Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.Howe, William F.
History
Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations: The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes, and Criminals and their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.
Howe, William F.
Crime -- New York (State) -- New York; Criminals -- New York (State) -- New York; New York (N.Y.) -- Social conditions
Sometimes it happens that the pretty girl, wearied of waiting for her
knightly deliverer, comes across the advertisement of a gifted
seeress--the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, perchance, or "the
only English prophetess who has the genuine Roman and Arabian talismans
for love, good luck, and all business affairs;" or the wonderful
clairvoyant who can be "consulted on absent friends, love, courtship and
marriage." Not infrequently she falls into the toils of those
advertising frauds, who frequently combine the vile trade of procuress
with the ostensible trade of fortune-telling. When the girl is drawn to
this den, the trump card offered her is, of course, the young gentleman,
rich as Crœsus and handsome as Adonis, with whom she is to fall in
love. He is generally described with considerable minuteness, and the
time and place of meeting foretold. This may be fictitious, and it is
fortunate for her if it is so. Rut the seeress too frequently needs no
powers of clairvoyance or ratiocination to make these disclosures, for
some _roue_; who has exhausted the ordinary rounds of dissipation, or
some fast young fellow seeking a change, has made a bargain with the
prophetess for a new and innocent victim--the amount of the fee to
depend on the means and liberality of the libertine and the
attractiveness of the victim. The vain, silly girl is dazzled with the
wily woman's story, and readily promises to call again. At her next
visit the man inspects her from some place of concealment, and if she
meets his views, either an introduction takes place or a rendezvous is
perfected. Thus the acquaintance begins, with the result which every
intelligent reader can see for himself. Sometimes the picture of the
scamp is shown, but in every case there is but one end in view on the
part of the seeress, and that end is almost invariably achieved. The
girl thus becomes clandestinely "gay," and spreads the influence of her
evil example and impure associations among her shopmates. Pope has told
us in four immortal lines the effects of a constant contact with vice.
In the second epistle of his Essay on Man, he writes:
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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