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
Let not the reader imagine that Olly's love was all of the
lip-and-epistolary cheap style. Even as faith without works is dead,
being alone, so professions of affection without exemplification would
be simply worth "Jocko," and that worthless creature, according to the
mariner, was good for "nix." No; the captain had presented his darling
with diamonds--a cross, for example, which cost $1,000, and a watch and
chain and other jewelry, amounting in the whole to $2,800.
The impartial reader, therefore, from the excerpts of his correspondence
and the summary of the jewelry, will be enabled to form a pretty fair
idea of the esteem in which the captain formerly held his wife. Ah! but
then the reader is not aware that Olly is very handsome, and so very,
very gay! Olly's immaculate shirt-bosom was in the habit of bristling
with diamonds, in the midst of which, like a headlight at the
mizzen-top, coruscated a diamond cluster pin.
Marie was not jealous without a cause. Of this, every lady who has read
thus far is morally convinced. Marie and her "spy" had discovered the
cause, just sixteen brief days after Olly had penned that remarkable
letter, with a benediction and a "kiss-me" lozenge at the end, Mrs.
Hazard and her maid, Esther Doerner, hied them down and across town
until they reached a boarding-house on West Ninth street. What happened
in this high-toned hash dispensary let Miss Margaret Gilman, an
eye-witness, proclaim by her affidavit:
"At half-past eight in the evening, Mrs. Hazard came in and went to a
hall bed-room in the front, and knocked at the door of said room. She
was accompanied by her maid, Esther Doerner. After she knocked, the door
was opened from within by Lena Kimball. Lena attempted to close the
door, but Mrs. Hazard's superior strength forced an opening, and she and
her maid entered." Now let lynx-eyed Esther take up the narrative for a
brief space: "Lena was but slightly clothed, having only a skirt and a
sacque on. Lena asked: 'Who is this woman?' Mrs. Hazard replied,
'I am his lawful wife--you are his mistress!'" Then ensued a scene which
Margaret and Esther are in accord in describing: "Lena attacked Mrs.
Hazard, slapped her in the face and pulled her hair, said captain,
meantime, holding his wife's hands and thus preventing her defending
herself!"
Let us hear Miss Margaret C. Gilman, who is a dressmaker, a little
further: "About the following Thursday I visited No. 106 West Sixteenth
street, at request of said Lena Kimball, to arrange about a dress for
her, when I saw said Captain Hazard enter the room of Lena. I left them
together, alone. Lena told me that the captain would commence
proceedings for a divorce from his wife."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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