Hartley had taken up his abode in the very heart of the lower East Side. On that part of Division Street where the Second Avenue elevated railway curls bustlingly into Chatham Square, very much as a busy little brook curls round a bit of rock, stands one of those crowded hives of toiling men and women known as a sweat-shop. In a little back room at the top of this building Hartley subletted his New York home. The jail-like doorway of this building opened on a street of eternal twilight--a street barred above like a dungeon by the iron girders of the overhead railway, through which only the noonday sun could fret for an hour or two. It was a tunnel of a thousand odors, and over it whimpered and frolicked the elevated trains as they went scurrying up to the open sunlight of the higher city. Long before the sun crept up over the East River this tenement hummed like a beehive with its hundreds of busy sewing-machines, and in and out of its gloomy doorway women came and went at all times of the day with great bundles poised on their heads. It seemed from without only a gloomy building of windows and red bricks, with crazily littered fire-escapes breaking the line of its dull walls. At its center, strangely enough, it formed a little triangular court, after the fashion of its sisters of the Old World, and round this little inner court rose dilapidated wooden galleries, tier after tier, until only a pitiable three-cornered scrap of blue sky could be seen at the top on clear days. At the bottom of this light-well, even gloomier and more odorous than the street without, there was always a tang of chloride of lime in the air. The broken flagstones forming its floor sloped to the center, where a hydrant-pump stood in a pool of tainted water. From each gallery of the court radiated a number of passages--many-sinked, low-ceilinged passages, tunneling through mysterious twilight for hundreds of feet, and opening through many narrow doors into hundreds of fetid and overcrowded rooms.