And good old Cuff drained his half tumbler of raw spirits as unconcernedly as if it had not been one of a dozen odd, similarly large and strong, he had tasted since dinner. Then the four men sat down to a greasy table, located in the middle of the apartment, and, by the light of the single, smoking miners’ lamp, essayed the interesting game of poker, the ante being the small sum of one dime. That room and its contents would rejoice the graphic pencil of a Hogarth, or the facile pen of a Dickens, were these great artists alive to enter its stifling and tobacco-smoked precincts. Let me attempt merely to outline the curious picture. Descending a steep flight of well-worn stone steps, from the sidewalk, a reasonably tall man would have to stoop considerably to save his head from coming in violent collision with the arched lintel. Pushing open the paintless, but by no means colorless, door, the interior premises were at once disclosed to view. No, not at once, as it consumed some moments for the best eyes to penetrate to the most distant walls, by reason of the density and murkiness of the atmosphere, and the prevalence of smoke from some cookery and several tobacco pipes. But there could be no delay in the process of smelling the presence of perspiring humanity in its most filthy forms. It required stomach and lungs inured by extended habit to confinement in similarly reeking, social stews, to enable a person to exist for any length of time in the air of Micky Cuff’s castle. Two low windows at the front gave a dim light during the day, while at night a flaring flame from a small lamp was all the illumination the apartment afforded. The room was possibly thirty feet in length, and eighteen wide. The ceiling, which was once whitewashed, and then left for years to accumulate smoke, dust, and moisture, was scant six feet above the dirty floor, and the encompassing walls were of the same piece—adorned here and there with a rusty nail, on which hung either a coat, a skirt, a skillet, or a frying-pan—and in the economy of this particular family it mattered little as to their rotation. It might be a pan, a dress, and a hat, or perchance a hat, a pan, and a dress. Across one corner of the further end a string was drawn, and to it a sheet hung suspended. Behind this temporary screen slept all the Cuff family—man, wife, and five small children. When the detective entered, a chicken and two pullets were serenely roosting on the top of this convenient bed-room partition, and the curtain evidenced, from its plentiful want of cleanliness, that they were unaccustomed to make their nightly vigils elsewhere—for sleep they could not while Cuff was awake, and that was generally the greater portion of the night. In that triangular recess the Cuff family reposed. In that dingy apartment the same persons cooked, washed, ate, drank, and sold whisky to customers—beside keeping two boarders, who occupied a second and calico curtained corner opposite that of the Cuffs.