At one time there lay at the corner of Twenty seventh-Street and Seventh Avenue the dead body of a negro, stripped nearly naked, and around it a collection of Irishmen, absolutely dancing or shouting like wild Indians. Sullivan and Roosevelt Streets are great negro quarters, and here a negro was afraid to be seen in the street. If in want of something from a grocery, he would carefully open the door, and look up and down to see if any one was watching, and then steal cautiously forth, and hurry home on his errand. Two boarding-houses here were surrounded by a mob, but the lodgers, seeing the coming storm, fled. The desperadoes, finding only the owner left behind, wreaked their vengeance on him, and after beating him unmercifully, broke up the furniture, and then fired the buildings. A German store near by, because it was patronized extensively by negroes, shared the same fate, after its contents had been distributed among themselves. A negro barber's shop was next attacked, and the torch applied to it. A negro lodging-house in the same street next received the visit of these furies, and was soon a mass of ruins. Old men, seventy years of age, and young children, too young to comprehend what it all meant, were cruelly beaten and killed. The spirit of hell seemed to have entered the hearts of these men, and helpless womanhood was no protection against their rage. Sometimes a stalwart negro would break away from his murderers, and run for his life. With no place of safety to which he could flee, he would be headed off in every direction, and forced towards the river. Driven at last to the end of a pier, he would leap off, preferring to take his chances in the water rather than among these bloody men. If bruised and beaten in his desperate struggle for life, he would soon sink exhausted with his efforts. Sometimes he would strike out for a ship, but more often dive under the piers, and hold on to a timber for safety, until his yelling pursuers had disappeared, when he would crawl stealthily out, and with terrified face peer in every direction to see if they had gone. Two were thus run off together into the East River. It was a strange spectacle to see a hundred Irishmen pour along the streets after a poor negro. If he could reach a police station he felt safe; but, alas! if the force happened to be away on duty, he could not stay even there. Whenever the police could strike the track of the mad hunt, they stopped it summarily, and the pursuers became the pursued, and received the punishment they had designed for the negro. All this was in the nineteenth century, and in the metropolis of the freest and most enlightened nation on earth. [Image: Hanging and burning a negro in Clarkson Street.]