"I had a chat with an old detective, who says to me about McGlory: 'He is a Fourth-warder by birth. He has a big pull in politics, but takes no direct part himself. He pays his way with the police, and that ends it. I have known him for years, and 'tough' as he is, I would take his word as quick as I would take the note of half the bank presidents of New York. His place is in the heart of a tenement region, where there are a great many unmarried men. Grouped around him are the rooms and haunts of hundreds of prostitutes, with their pimps, thieves and pick-pockets who thrive in such atmosphere. His place is head-quarters for them. These can not be suppressed, and it is part of the police policy to leave a few places like McGlory's where you can lay your hands on a man at any time, rather than scatter them indiscriminately over the city.'
"We go out on Hester street. It is a narrow, dirty, filthy street. It is the early morning—five o'clock. We had spent nearly five hours in the den. The air was reeking with the filthy odors of the night, but it was refreshing compared with the atmosphere we had left.
"We get in our carriage to go home.
"Three or four blocks up-town we pass Cooper Institute and the old Mercantile Library. A stone's throw from McGlory's are the great thoroughfares of the Bowery and Broadway. You could stand on his house-top and shoot a bullet into the City of Churches. I have not told the half, no, nor the tenth, of what we saw at his place. It can not be told. There is no newspaper would dare print it. There is no writer who could present it in shape for publication. It can only be hinted at. There is beastliness and depravity under his roof compared with which no chapter in the world's history is equal.
"Involuntarily, when I reached my apartment, I turned into the bath-room and bathed my face and hands. It was like getting a breath of heaven after experiencing a foretaste of sheol."
[C]HAPTER XXIII.
OUR WASTE BASKET.
Contemporaneous Records and Memoranda of Interesting Cases.
[M]iss Ruff's Tribulations.
Miss Louise Ruff was a tall, fair-complexioned young lady of twenty-two, with a handsome form, lovely shoulders, handsome arms and bewitching address. Her family was well known on the east side of the town, and she had received a fairly liberal education. Miss Ruff, two or three years previous to the legal proceedings here chronicled, had the good or bad fortune to form the acquaintance of Mr. Julius Westfall, the well-to do proprietor of a couple of restaurants. Mr. Westfall was a Teutonic "masher" with which any Venus would have been justified in falling in love. He was a brunette with hyacinthine locks and lustrous black eyes, and with hands and feet too pretty, almost, for use. Mr. Julius Westfall fell violently in love with Louise. She had dropped in with a lady friend to drink a cup of coffee. From behind the receipt of custom he took an observation, and then he began to prance round, as one who had suddenly been attacked by a combination of the fire of St. Anthony and the dance of St. Vitus. He skipped around the saloon like a grasshopper on a gravel lot, and smiled, and smiled, and smiled—looking his Fourth-of-July prettiest. Of course Miss Ruff nudged her companion above the fifth rib, and whispered something complimentary to the beaming proprietor; and when the ladies left, he bowed them out with all the grace of a Belgravia footman.