Beadle's Pocket Library No. 127

This serial installment of "Tony Fox, the Ferret; or, Boss Bob's Big Job" by Edward L. Wheeler opens with a deathbed prologue: a dying mother entrusts her six-month-old daughter to a Frenchwoman named Felice. A sinister man confronts Felice, offering money to drown the child so he can sell the mother's corpse to medical students. Felice agrees, descending into rainy Philadelphia streets toward the Delaware River.

The narrative then shifts to Boss Bob, a street-smart bootblack sleeping in a doorway during the 1876 Centennial. Observing Felice carrying the bundled infant, he follows her to the waterfront and witnesses her setting a boat containing the baby adrift. Boss Bob commandeers another boat, retrieves the child at dawn, and returns to the wharves. Despite the boatman's initial anger and a policeman's suggestion of an asylum, Bob resololutely adopts the foundling himself, carrying the awakened, crying infant through Philadelphia's streets.