The police kept up the war unremittingly, and the result was that at last York street was cleansed from end to end. A few of the old habitues still prowl about, and one or two dives have ventured to blossom forth again into existence. In McQuarry’s den it was the custom to hold a dance weekly, and these were perhaps THE MOST DREADFUL FEATURES of these wicked holes. A small fee was charged, but the proprietor depended more on the sale of bad liquor for his profits than on this admission. Many of the revelers had other business speculations in their eye, and woe be to the man wearing anything of value who did not keep all his senses about him, and even then he was not safe. “Having paid my ten cents to a young man at the foot of the stairs,” says an eye-witness of one of these orgies, “I descended into a cellar whose rough stone walls had once been whitewashed, but which were now discolored with the slimy moisture which oozed therefrom. The place was not large, and the 12 or 15 couple who were on the floor did not have much room in which to turn. Two colored lads supplied the music, one playing a very wheezy concertina, and the other tooting a fife. The company was largely composed of bad women and thieves. Here and there, however, could be seen a man who ought to be respectable, and who usually was accounted among his fellow-men as such. They were on the spree, and one of them, a master plasterer, I was told had been around the place for a week. He was sitting on a stone which had been pulled out of the wall, with a loathsome-looking creature seated on his knee. Among the SCORE OF WOMEN in the place there is not one who has one redeeming look of womanhood left. They have not that one trait which leaves a woman last—the desire to look well. Their faces are swollen with the fiery liquids they have been pouring into themselves all night. The men for the most part are not nearly so repulsive. The few “suckers” who are in the room, are doing all the treating, and as they produce their money furtive glances are exchanged, and that man’s “roll” is spotted. The company gets more riotous as the night proceeds and as the liquor begins to take hold. A fight starts in one corner of the room and all hands seem to join in. Pandemonium has broke loose. “At once there rose so loud a yell Within that dark and narrow dell, As if the fiends from heaven that fell Had pealed the battle-cry of hell.” Women and all join in the melee, and the cursing is terrible for its impiety and ferocity. At last the main combatants are parted, and one of them is carried upstairs almost insensible, with blood streaming from his chin, where his antagonist had rended a piece of flesh half off with his teeth. The victor swaggers about with the air of a conqueror, and his blood-covered fangs make even the boldest rough of them all tremble.