The street itself, like the majority of the streets of the sort in New York, is strewn with garbage and refuse of every description; no need for its inhabitants to copy the example of their more respectable neighbours, and nightly put forth the barrow filled with the cinders and sweepings of the day; for what the Brown-street denizens have to get rid of, they adopt a more easy way with, and throwing it into the middle of the street, there let it lie. The only one portion of the road which is kept at all decent is the track of the horse-cars, which enormous lumbering vehicles permeate a portion of the street, and by their noise, the cracking of their drivers' whips, and the jangling of their bells attached to the horses, dispel some of the monotony which settles down on the neighbourhood during the daytime. Some days after Trenton Warren's interview with Helen Griswold, and late in the afternoon, just when the early spring sun had withdrawn his brightness from the world, and the keen savage wind, sweeping through the wide thoroughfares, had reminded men that the reign of winter could scarcely be called at an end, a motley company was assembled in one of the Brown-street cellars, known to its frequenters as Naty Underwood's. A fat man Naty Underwood, with a round face and pendulous cheeks, little thin slits of eyes, and an upturned inquisitive nose; altogether not unlike a pig, whence probably the playful designation 'Porky' by which he is known to his familiars; a reserved man given to much quiet expectoration, a skilful concoctor of drinks, but always in a quiet manner and as unlike the conventional idea of a 'bar-keeper' as possible. Yet bar-keeping was Naty Underwood's trade, and by the exercise of it he lived. That dark smoke-discoloured saloon, whose original gaudily-stencilled walls now bore huge blots and stains, caused in some places by damp, in others by the sudden outburst of effervescent drinks, was his whisky-store; those long-necked labelled bottles on the wooden counter before him were his stock-in-trade, and the men lounging around were his customers.