Through winding streets and cross lanes, by sudden turns and jumbles, they drifted along. Now, cabby was in Washington street, amid a sea of trucks and horses, huge omnibusses and small fry, groping as in the dark; now he dashed through another street, on the west side of which spread out, like a moss carpet, the Common; the broad, the beautiful, the world-famed Boston Common. Then a turn was made, and Maria thought that they were going back to the very wharf they had left. But he soon bore off to the right, over by a large brick edifice, standing on an eminence and commanding one of the loveliest prospects which creation affords. As she saw it, through a pane in the cab door, she almost forgot her destitute situation and her sorrows. Passing this, they descended a hill, and at length cabby halted before a house in Lowell street. It was a house of ill-fame. The character of its inmates were of course unknown to her; her heart was even gladdened by the light of a bevy of gay faces at the window. As she alighted on the pavement, a raven, so unusual in that place, darted by so close to her that its pinions brushed the ribbons of her bonnet. She entered the house and was familiarly but respectfully welcomed, saying all the while in her bosom, “Thank God, it is well at last.” [Illustration] Oh, conjurings of innocence, thy web is woven with threads of chalk--the morality and uprightness of this world! The wolf howls at thy philosophy and is hungering! Dream not of the world’s honor, nor seek disinterestedness among men; for thou wilt not find it. Hearken no more to the seductive accents of friendship; they flow from polluted lips; in them the devil chants thy requiem. Hate and curse and shun the Race; in that and that only is there protection and safety. The seraglio of vice into which Maria had thus been cast, was daily and nightly visited by men of all grades. Came there the banker in silk stockings; the improvident sailor, just from the wave; the artisan, with the pittance of toil; the sucker-sharp, whose swindlings and lies are the wages of prostitution; the students of Harvard; the silver-haired deacon of the church of God; yea, EVEN THE PREACHER, RIGHT FROM HIS PULPIT, FLUSHED WITH WINE AND LUST![7] Came there the men of the South, ardent as a southern sun could make them: reckless men, who dashed about the country, lavishing the coffers wrung from the blood of slavery. And they not only, but likewise the pomatum beetles and butterflies of Europe, the spawn of an imbecile aristocracy, who are the scavengers of death and hell in every age and clime. * * * * *