As I plodded up Broadway, looking in here and there upon the palatial splendors of metropolitan "saloons"--I think that is the word for fashionable upper class grog-shops--I almost involuntarily cried, "hot corn," as I saw the hot spirit of that grain, under the various guises of "pure gin"--"old rum"--"pale brandy"--"pure port"--"Heidsick"--or "Lager-bier"--poured down the throats of men--and ah! yes, of women, too, whose daughters may some day sit, at midnight, upon the cold curbstone, crying "Hot corn," to gain a penny for the purchase of a drink of the fiery dragon they are now inviting to a home in their bosoms, whose cry in after years will be, "Give, give, give," and still as unsatisfied as the horse-leech's daughters. Again, as I passed on up that street, still busy and thronged at midnight, as a country village at mid-day intermission of church service, ever and anon, from some side-street, came up the cry of "Hot corn--hot corn!" and ever as I heard it, and ever as I shall, through all years to come, I thought of that little girl and her drunken mother, and the "bad man" at the corner grocery, and that her's was the best, the strongest Maine Law argument which had ever fallen upon my listening ear. Again, as I turned the corner of Spring street, the glare and splendor of a thousand gas lights, and the glittering cut glass of that, for the first time lighted-up, bar-room of the Prescott House--so lauded by the press for its magnificence--dashes our eyes and blinds our senses, till we are almost ready to agree, that first class hotels must have such Five Point denizen-making appurtenances, as this glittering room, shamelessly, invitingly open to the street; when that watch-word cry, like the pibroch's startling peal, came up from the near vicinity, wailing like a lost spirit on the midnight air--"Hot corn, hot corn!--here's your nice hot corn--smoking hot--hot--hot corn." "Yes, yes!" I hear you cry--"it is a watchword--a glorious watchword, that bids us do or die--until the smoking hot, fiery furnace-like gates of hell, like this one now yawning before us, shall cease to be licensed by a Christian people, or send delicate little girls at midnight through the streets, crying 'Hot corn,' to support a drunken mother, whose first glass was taken in a 'fashionable saloon,' or first-class liquor-selling hotel." "Hot corn," then, be the watchword of all who would rather see the grain fed to the drunkard's wife and children, than into the insatiable hot maw of the whiskey still. Let your resolutions grow hot and strong, every time you hear this midnight city cry, that you will devote, if nothing more, "Three grains of corn, mother, Only three grains of corn," towards the salvation of the thousand equally pitiable objects as the little girl whose wailing cry has been the inciting cause of this present dish of "Hot Corn--smoking hot!" CHAPTER III. WILD MAGGIE. "A woman sometimes scorns what best contents her."