of narrow, dirty steps, up which come
fumes of coffee and cooked viands, are to be seen at short intervals,
and these restaurants are supported mainly by the denizens of the
street. Shops in the windows of which blazes much cheap jewelry abound,
and there are also many tobacconists on a small scale.

The lights of Chatham Square twinkle out now; and here I pause before a
feature very peculiar to the Bowery,--one of those large, open shops in
which vociferous salesmen address from galleries a motley crowd of men
and women. One fellow in dirty shirt-sleeves and a Turkish cap
flourishes aloft something which looks like a fan, but proves, on closer
inspection, to be a group composed of several pocket-combs, a razor, and
other small articles, constituting in all a "lot." This he offers, with
stentorian utterances, for a price "a hundred per cent less, _you_ bet,
than you kin buy 'em for on Broadway." Other salesmen lean furiously
over the gallery railing, flourishing shirts, stockings, and garments of
every kind, mentionable and unmentionable, in the faces of the gaping
loafers below. Sometimes a particular "lot" will attract the attention
of a spectator, and he will chaffer about it for a while; but the sales
do not often appear to be very brisk. The people one sees in these
places are very characteristic of the Bowery. Many of them are what the
police call "hard cases,"--men, with coarse, bulldog features, their
mustaches trimmed very close, and dyed with something that gives them a
foxy-black hue. Women, many of them with children in their arms, have
come to look out for bargains. Near the entrance, which is quite open to
the street, there stands a man with a light cane in his hand, which he
lays every now and then over the shoulders of some objectionable youth
marked by him in the crowd. The objectionable youth is a pickpocket, or
a "sneak-thief," or both, and the man with the cane is the private
detective attached to the place. He is well acquainted with the regular
thieves of these localities, and his business is to "spot" them, and
keep them from edging in among the loose articles lying about the store.
He says that there area great many notorious pickpockets in the crowd,
and he looks like one who knows.

Here and there along the Bowery small, shrivelled Chinamen stand by
rickety tables, on which a few boxes of cheap cigars are exposed for
sale. These foreigners look uneasy in their Bowery clothes, which are of
the