The picture has still another side. What does the reader think, for example, of a mother who has three daughters,--bright, beautiful little girls, with long braided hair hanging down their shapely backs, large, lustrous, melting eyes; childish, innocent-looking lambs, aged respectively thirteen, fifteen and seventeen,--and sends them on the street in the afternoons, exquisitely and temptingly dressed, in order to capture susceptible elderly gentlemen? Yet these bewitching little girls have been often seen in the neighborhood of Madison Square, on Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and even down on Wall street. Their mother would follow them at a distance, keeping them in view all the time. When accosted by a gentleman, which happened every day, their mother would follow them, watch the man when he came out of the house or hotel with one of her daughters, and the next day visit him, saying he had destroyed her young and beautiful daughter, and so on, and that she was going to have him arrested. This species of black-mail is not so uncommon as it would seem, even the fathers of young and prepossessing girls are partners in these affairs. As a fact there is nothing that devilish ingenuity can devise to entice men and women into committing every kind of crime that is not practiced by the blackmailers of this city, and many are the fish that are landed and great the booty that is secured. CHAPTER XIX. ABOUT DETECTIVES. _The "Javerts," "Old Sleuths" and "Buckets" of Fiction as Contrasted with the Genuine Article--Popular Notions of Detective Work Altogether Erroneous--An Ex-Detective's Views--The Divorce Detective_.