Beadle's Pocket Library No. 134

This issue features "Mike Merry, the Harbor Police Boy; or, The Night-Hawks of the Quaker City" by Charles Morris. The serial follows young Mike Merry, a diminutive harbor police operative in Philadelphia, as he shadows a gang of five criminals led by the sharp-featured "Levi the fox" through the city's underworld. After observing them meeting in a Kensington tavern and overhearing a reference to a ship called the Fleetwing, Mike signals his superior officers waiting offshore in a barge. While Mike's boat pursues the criminals downriver, the gang boards the Fleetwing at her mooring, where a murderous conspirator enters a cabin and prepares to knife a sleeping bearded man with a knife. A secondary scene introduces two impoverished but genteel women—one middle-aged and pleasant-faced, one seventeen-year-old beauty—whose connection to the criminal plot remains unclear.