But waste no time in seeking what is new.
This is most emphatically the bartering-place of the worn and old.
Second-hand coats, trousers, hats and shoes. Damaged crockery, rusty cutlery, half-worn articles of ladies' apparel, whose uses we would, of course, not even dare to name. Lace curtains, kitchen pots and pans, cheap chromos, candlesticks and beads, all are represented here, while small peddlers, whose stock in trade is carried in their hands, move here and there in the crowd, adding, with their various cries, to the strangeness of the scene.
We left Detective Hook by the church-yard wall at the moment of his encounter with the woman who with strange mutterings hurried past.
We find him at the early hour of half-past four moving down Catherine street in the direction of the singular scene we have just described.
And just before him is the woman, still treading wearily along the snow-covered sidewalk, her wild eyes ever roving here and there, now to the right and now to the left, never resting for even one moment of time.
The storm has ceased at last. The clouds have rolled away to the eastward; the stars shine brightly in the cold, wintry sky.
And the busy market is teeming with activity and life while the remainder of the great city is still locked in slumber and repose.
Who is this strange creature with her singular mutterings concerning "bats in the wall?"
It is just this that the detective sought to learn; and in the endeavor to learn it had not suffered the woman to pass from his observation from the moment of their first encounter until now.