Madame Restell's clients were all, or nearly all women of the higher orders of society, and of liberal means. Of this disgraceful fact there can be no manner of doubt. Her scale of charges was so extravagant as to positively prohibit her employment by any one unable to pay a handsome fee for the gratification of their murderous project. Sometimes a poor girl, ruined by some wealthy libertine, would be supplied by him with funds to pay for the terrible operation which would conceal her folly; but in the great majority of cases they were ladies of wealth and social standing who went dressed in elegant apparel, loaded with jewelry, and double veiled, to her palatial mansion to obtain her aid. Madame Restell, whose name was a scandal and her Fifth-avenue house an outrage upon New York for years, was a native of Painswick, Gloucestershire. She was the daughter of a humble laborer named Trow, and first saw the light in 1813. Her educational facilities--as indeed were all those similarly or even better circumstanced in England seventy years ago--were of the humblest kind. But she was made to work, taught to use her needle, and "sent out to service" in her early teens. And so it came to pass that, at the age of sixteeen, she was "maid of all work" for a butcher in her native town. She was quite good-looking, with piercing black eyes and thick, luxuriant black hair, and shapely form. She had many candidates for her young affections among the young weavers of the place, but a journeyman tailor named Henry Somers was the successful wooer. A year or two after the wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Somers emigrated and came to the city of New York, settling over on the east side, about Oliver street. Somers was lazy, improvident and a tippler, and after a short sojourn in America Mrs. Somers found herself a young and blooming widow, with one child, a girl, to provide for. She had all along industriously supplemented her husband's earnings by her needle. She was now wholly dependent upon it for the subsistence of herself and child. It was while in these pinched circumstances that she made the acquaintance of Charles R. Lohman, a printer poor as herself, and became his wife. There was no immediate improvement in their condition. Both were impatient of the pinchings of poverty. Neither was constitutionally disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which released them from this condition of chafing discontent and brooding unrest. From what source a knowledge of the ingredients requisite for the composition of a pill for such a diabolical purpose was derived, or whether, indeed, the pill was effective or diabolical at all, remains a mystery, inasmuch as none of her medicine seems to have been subjected to chemical analysis. Suffice to say that the couple rented a small room, and the first advertisement of the female physician was printed in the old _Sun_, and paid for with borrowed money.