Lights and Shadows of New York Life: or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
Lights and Shadows of New York Life: or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
"_City and County of New York_, _ss_.--Mary Conway, being duly sworn,
doth depose and say: I have lived with Mr. and Mrs. Haggerty, in the
County Court-House, for over fourteen months, as cook; for about three or
four months I did general housework; on Sunday morning, September 10th, I
got out of bed with the child that slept with me, wanting to get up; I
don't know whether it was half-past six or seven o'clock; Mrs. Haggerty
came into the room in her night-dress; and said to me, 'it is too early
to get up yet;' I said to her, 'being as I am up I guess I will dress
myself;' as I was dressed I went out into the hall; I heard a knocking
down stairs; I said to Mrs. Haggerty, 'it sounds as if it was at the
Comptroller's door;' I went over to the kitchen, unlocked the kitchen
door, and went down stairs to the head of the stairs that leads to the
Comptroller's hall; I saw Charley Baulch knocking at the Comptroller's
door, and calling, 'Murphy, are you there?' Murphy is a watchman; I came
up stairs and went back to the kitchen; shortly after I went down stairs
again and saw Charley Baulch with the door of the Comptroller's office
open, he holding it back on the outside, and I saw Mr. Haggerty come out
of the door with bundles of papers in his arms and bring them up to his
bedroom; the door where he came out is at the foot of the stairs, where
the glass is broken, going into the County Bureau; I came back, and did
not go down any more; each bundle of papers was tied with either a pink
tape or a pink ribbon round them; the next thing, I went over from the
kitchen out into the hall for a scuttle of coal; in this hall Mr.
Haggerty's bedroom door faced me; I saw a man with gray clothes going in
there with another bundle of papers like what Mr. Haggerty had; then I
brought back the coal to the kitchen, and put it on the fire; the next I
saw was this man with the gray clothes going down with a pillow-case on
his back, full, that looked as though filled with papers, shaped like the
bundles Mr. Haggerty had; at the same time he went down the stairs
Charley Baulch said to him, 'This way;' I kind of judged there was
something up, and I went to look in the drawer where the pillow-cases
were, and I missed one of the linen pillow-cases; I did this soon
afterward; soon after the man went down with the pillow-case, Mrs.
Haggerty came into the kitchen, giving me a key, and telling me to go
over to the drying-room; that is a room separate from the bedrooms; there
was a chest there full of linen, table linen and bed linen, and silver
right down in the bottom; she told me to get a nut-picker and bring it
over, as Mr. Haggerty wanted one; I took all the clothes out of the
trunk, and got the nut-picker and brought it back to her, and before I
got into the kitchen I said to Mrs. Haggerty, 'What is the matter? The
kitchen's all black with smoke, and the dining room's all black with
smoke.' She said, 'Mr. Haggerty wanted these papers burned, I told him
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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