The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York CityMcCabe, James Dabney
History
The Secrets of the Great City: A Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York City
McCabe, James Dabney
New York (N.Y.) -- Description and travel; New York (N.Y.) -- History
A man by the name of D----, or R----, purporting to hail from St.
Louis, has enjoyed many years' experience as a hotel 'beat.' He is a
tall, not ill-looking fellow, of tolerable address, and generally
travels accompanied by his wife and three children, and by a large
trunk; his wife sometimes contrives to smuggle in the third child
secretly, and to hide it in the room allotted to them, so that only two
children appear on the bill. At any rate the bill is never paid
whenever settlement is demanded. Mr. D--, or R--, is always found in
his apartment seated at the table, busy with an elaborate assortment of
manuscripts, and so busy that really at present he cannot be disturbed.
To-morrow he will attend to every thing. But to-morrow the birds have
flown, or walked out, one by one, from the hotel, and when the trunk,
is opened, there is a beggarly array of brickbats, old boxes, old rags,
and carpets, the former having served to render the trunk weighty, the
latter to prevent any noise or rolling that might excite suspicion.
Another adventurer, a bachelor, by the name of M----, affects the
eccentric, and, as the day approaches for the handing in of his bill,
his eccentricity verges upon madness, till at last, when the document
is really tendered, he becomes absolutely crazy--shouts, sings,
performs in an antic manner, and declares himself to be the king of the
Jews, the President of the United States, or something of that sort. He
has sufficient method in his madness, however, to gain the advantage of
the hotel proprietors, having on one occasion beaten the Fifth Avenue
Hotel out of one hundred and seventy-one dollars in board and lodging.
He sometimes is to be seen on Broadway in the guise of a military
officer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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