An Outcast; Or, Virtue and FaithAdams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
General
An Outcast; Or, Virtue and Faith
Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
Conduct of life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Vice -- Fiction
Breakfast is scarcely over when Sister Slocum, in great agitation, comes
bustling into the parlor, offers the most acceptable apologies for her
absence, and pours forth such a vast profusion of solicitude for Mrs.
Swiggs' welfare, that that lady is scarce able to withstand the
kindness. She recounts the numerous duties that absorb her attention,
the missions she has on hand, the means she uses to keep up an interest
in them, the amount of funds necessary to their maintenance. A large
portion of these funds she raises with her own energy. She will drag up
the heathen world; she will drag down Satan. Furnishing Mrs. Swiggs
with the address of the House of the Foreign Missions, in Centre street,
she excuses herself. How superlatively happy she would be to accompany
Mrs. Swiggs. A report to present to the committee on finance, she
regrets, will prevent this. However, she will join her precisely at
twelve o'clock, at the House. She must receive the congratulations of
the Board. She must have a reception that will show how much the North
respects her co-laborers of the South. And with this, Sister Slocum
takes leave of her guest, assuring her that all she has to do is to get
into the cars in the Bowery. They will set her down at the door.
Ten o'clock finds our indomitable lady, having preferred the less
expensive mode of walking, entering a strange world. Sauntering along
the Bowery she turns down Bayard street. Bayard street she finds lined
with filthy looking houses, swarming with sickly, ragged, and besotted
poor; the street is knee-deep with corrupting mire; carts are tilted
here and there at intervals; the very air seems hurling its pestilence
into your blood. Ghastly-eyed and squalid children, like ants in quest
of food, creep and swarm over the pavement, begging for bread or
uttering profane oaths at one another. Mothers who never heard the Word
of God, nor can be expected to teach it to their children, protrude
their vicious faces from out reeking gin shops, and with bare breasts
and uncombed hair, sweep wildly along the muddy pavement, disappear into
some cavern-like cellar, and seek on some filthy straw a resting place
for their wasting bodies. A whiskey-drinking Corporation might feast its
peculative eyes upon hogs wallowing in mud; and cellars where swarming
beggars, for six cents a night, cover with rags their hideous
heads--where vice and crime are fostered, and into which your sensitive
policeman prefers not to go, are giving out their seething miasma. The
very neighborhood seems vegetating in mire. In the streets, in the
cellars, in the filthy lanes, in the dwellings of the honest poor, as
well as the vicious, muck and mire is the predominating order. The
besotted remnants of depraved men, covered with rags and bedaubed with
mire, sit, half sleeping in disease and hunger on decayed door-stoops.
Men with bruised faces, men with bleared eyes, men in whose every
feature crime and dissipation is stamped, now drag their waning bodies
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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