Children of the TenementsRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
General
Children of the Tenements
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Short stories, American; Tenement houses -- Fiction
A tenant who came out saw that she was ill, and helped her into the
hall. She gasped once or twice, and then lay back, dead.
Word went around to the Elizabeth Street station, and was sent on from
there with an order for the dead-wagon. Maggie's turn had come for
the ride up the Sound. She was as good as checked for the Potter's
Field, but Pell Street made an effort and came up almost to Maggie's
standard.
Even while the dead-wagon was rattling down the Bowery, one of the
tenants ran all the way to Henry Street, where he had heard that
Maggie's father lived, and brought him to the police station. The old
man wiped his eyes as he gazed upon his child, dead in her sins.
"She had a good home," he said to Captain Young, "but she didn't know
it, and she wouldn't stay. Send her home, and I will bury her with her
mother."
The Potter's Field was cheated out of a victim, and by Pell Street.
But the maelstrom grinds on and on.
SARAH JOYCE'S HUSBANDS
Policeman Muller had run against a boisterous crowd surrounding a
drunken woman at Prince Street and the Bowery. When he joined the
crowd it scattered, but got together again before it had run half a
block, and slunk after him and his prisoner to the Mulberry Street
station. There Sergeant Woodruff learned by questioning the woman that
she was Mary Donovan and had come down from Westchester to have a
holiday. She had had it without a doubt. The Sergeant ordered her to
be locked up for safe-keeping, when, unexpectedly, objection was made.
A small lot of the crowd had picked up courage to come into the
station to see what became of the prisoner. From out of this, one
spoke up: "Don't lock that woman up; she is my wife."
"Eh," said the Sergeant, "and who are you?"
The man said he was George Reilly and a salesman. The prisoner had
given her name as Mary Donovan and said she was single. The Sergeant
drew Mr. Reilly's attention to the street door, which was there for
his accommodation, but he did not take the hint. He became so abusive
that he, too, was locked up, still protesting that the woman was his
wife.
She had gone on her way to Elizabeth Street, where there is a matron,
to be locked up there; and the objections of Mr. Reilly having been
silenced at last, peace was descending once more upon the
station-house, when the door was opened, and a man with a swagger
entered.
"Got that woman locked up here?" he demanded.
"What woman?" asked the Sergeant, looking up.
"Her what Muller took in."
"Well," said the Sergeant, looking over the desk, "what of her?"
"I want her out; she is my wife. She--"
The Sergeant rang his bell. "Here, lock this man up with that woman's
other husband," he said, pointing to the stranger.
The fellow ran out just in time, as the doorman made a grab for him.
The Sergeant drew a tired breath and picked up the ruler to make a red
line in his blotter. There was a brisk step, a rap, and a young fellow
stood in the open door.
"Say, Serg," he began.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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