Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 516

1887 · 16 pages

This installment of "Five Points Phil's Menagerie" by Jo Pierce opens with Seth Maudston meeting his country niece Stella Fielding at Grand Central Depot after a train accident. He escorts her home by cab, where she clutches a decorative basket containing family jewels worth three thousand dollars—necessary to save her father's mortgaged homestead. The jewels mysteriously vanish from the locked basket during the journey, despite Stella never releasing it. Maudston engages detective Badger to recover them. The narrative then shifts to two street boys, Five Points Phil and Tim Thistle, discussing a peculiar employment advertisement seeking a boy fond of cats, posted by one Dorothea Sykes. The advertisement appears designed to recruit the right boy for unknown purposes, establishing mystery and intrigue as the serial's driving elements.

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