_A COLD_ wet drizzling rain was beginning to fall when Pinky Swett emerged from the house.

Twilight was gathering drearily.

She drew her thin shawl closely, and shivered as the east wind struck her with a chill.
At hurried walk of five or ten minutes brought her to a part of the town as little known to its citizens generally as if it were in the centre of Africa--a part of the town where vice, crime, drunkenness and beggary herd together in the closest and most shameless contact; where men and women, living in all foulness, and more like wild beasts than human beings, prey greedily upon each other, hurting, depraving and marring God's image in all over whom they can get power or influenced--_a very hell upon the earth!_--at part of the town where theft and robbery and murder are plotted, and from which prisons and almshouses draw their chief population.
That such a herding together, almost in the centre of a great Christian city, of the utterly vicious and degraded, should be permitted, when every day's police and criminal records give warning of its cost and danger, is a marvel and a reproach.

Almost every other house, in portions of this locality, is a dram-shop, where the vilest liquors are sold.

Policy-offices, doing business in direct violation of law, are in every street and block, their work of plunder and demoralization going on with open doors and under the very eyes of the police.