There sat the little eighteen-year-old, brown-eyed milliner, her dissipated face hollow and drawn from worry and lack of sleep and an insufficient quantity of nourishing food, while near her a white-haired old woman in shabby black was tightly grasping two quarters, her entire worldly possession. Just across sat a well-dressed woman restaurant keeper, a young Eastern Star, and half a hundred others, above all of whom shone the yellow-haired madam of the Peoria street resort, the star patron of that great gambling room for women, each one of whom was eagerly beckoning the well-groomed bookmaker, feverishly anxious to get her pittance on the race track favorite, when a connecting door was pushed suddenly open and in rushed a fashionably-dressed, brutal-faced young Russian Jew, holding loosely an immense roll of money. Tens, twenties, hundreds—he came with them until three hundred dollars had been placed to win upon a “clocker’s tip” in that day’s last race in Louisville. There was a grim, deadly silence, eating, unbearable silence in that gambling room as they waited the ring of the telephone and the name of the winner. Again the yellow-haired madam’s voice screamed shrilly out, for she was indeed ill at ease, her money was on the favorite—“Yes, a bunch of American 'fillies’ peddled out at fifty cents an hour to all comers, black and white, sick or sound. No wonder he can make a play like that on an outside chance.” Three hundred dollars! My heart stood still almost. The thought flashed through my brain that that wager meant hundreds of hours of shame and slavery and horror to those girls in the shanties down on Peoria Street, some mother’s girl, every one of them. I sat still for a little while and watched the fevered, anxious throng about me. My heart kept going faster and faster until I could bear it no longer. American “fillies” and body and soul under a brutal Russian Jewish whoremonger! I slipped quietly out into the street; night was coming on as I walked down Madison street and south on Peoria. Yes, there were the shanties—poor, wretched hovels, every one of them. Out shone the flickering red lights, out came the discordant, rasping sound of the rented piano, out belched the shrieks of drunken harlots, mingled with the groans and curses of task-masters in a foreign tongue, attracting the attention of the hundreds of laborers, negroes and boys, as they walked home on Peoria street from their day’s work. On I went until I came to the little shed just north of the slum saloon occupied by one S——, and checking my steps I looked around me on the squalid, wretched scene. I was in the midst of prostitution at its lowest—the heart-breaking dregs of Chicago’s twenty-two thousand public women. Yes, there they were—the fair young American girl, the stolid Russian Jewess, the middle-aged, syphilitic harlot, living, prostituting, dying, like so many hurt, broken moths around that great Red