Ladies have no idea what risks they run when making chance acquaintances, nor how such intimacy may end. They may be successfully fortified against all the arts and blandishments brought to attack their honor, and yet be seriously compromised. The handsome and fashionably dressed street-lounger is very frequently a resourceful rascal. He may invite the lady to take a carriage-ride, and, as has sometimes happened, an accomplice acts in the capacity of hackman. The drive selected is through the principal streets. Some hotel or fashionable restaurant is visited, and if she still successfully resists wine and wiles, it is more than likely that she will be visited the following day by a "detective" who will calmly inform her that he "shadowed" her yesterday. Of course he is after money, and she pays his demand rather than permit him to carry into execution his threat of telling her husband. Young girls, too, are frequently compromised by the professional "masher." This vile species of the _genus homo_ affects the fashionable streets where he saunters in solitary splendor, waiting for an opportunity to make the acquaintance of some young girl on her way to or from school. If her parents happen to be wealthy, the extraction of a neat sum follows this undesirable association; far an exposure in which her name would in any way be associated with the adventurer's, would forever stigmatize her in society. In some instances the immature acquaintance has developed into an elopement, and when parental interference followed, it was discovered that the scalawag husband was not only ready but willing to relinquish his bride when the money agreement was made sufficiently potent. Sometimes, again, a man is sufficiently infatuated to marry a lady with a soiled or shady reputation, and if that circumstance becomes known to the Knight of Black-mail, it is morally certain that potential hush-money will be extorted. In point of fact every kind of "skeleton," social or criminal, if once its whereabouts be discovered and its individuality established, becomes a source of revenue to those unscrupulous pirates of society.