In many of these places there were assembled scores of the most degraded and vicious members of society, who were lying in ambush, as it were, like tigers in a jungle, ready to spring upon and make a prey of anyone who came within the precincts of their lair.
Prisons, tread-wheels, penal settlements, gallows, were all vain and impotent as a punishment.
The ragged schools and city missions were of no avail as preventives of crime, so long as the wretched dens of infamy, brutality, and vice, termed “padding kens,” continued their daily and nightly work of demoralisation.
Mr. Wrench and the Liverpool constable entered one of these wretched receptacles for the homeless and lawless. As the miserable occupants were stretched on their dirty shake-downs, the policeman flashed his bull’s-eye in all directions.
Some of the occupants rolled over, and covered their faces with their begrimed bed-clothes, while others were fast asleep heedless of the visit of the “crushers,” and many of them for the nonce feigned to be slumbering.
It would be difficult, and indeed almost impossible, to describe to the reader the revolting nature of many of the places visited by the detective and his companions.
As the policeman flashed his light on the men in these unwholesome dens, Joe Doughty examined each countenance, but failed to find the man of whom they were in search.
One of the largest establishments of this class was kept by an Irishman named O’Flanagan, and after an inspection of a variety of these places the searchers bent their steps in the direction of that well-known place.
As they entered they were greeted by the mistress of the establishment, who was standing behind a sort of counter, which separated the front entrance from her own private parlour.
“Och, good luck to ye, Mr. Wrinch,” cried the woman, in a strong Irish accent. “An’ it’s mighty plazed I am to set eyes on your own swate fatures. Won’t ye be afther coming in and saying a kind word or two to a poor old sinful crathur like myself?”