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Title: Toronto by Gaslight: The Night Hawks of a Great City
       As Seen By the Reporters of "The Toronto News"

Author: The Toronto News

Release Date: August 15, 2018 [EBook #57700]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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Transcriber’s Note: Minor punctuation errors have been repaired. A list
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of contents doesn’t match the numbered chapter headings.




                                 NO. 1.

                     The Toronto Daily News Library

                          TORONTO BY GASLIGHT.

                  Thrilling Sketches of the Nighthawks
                            of a Great City.

              WRITTEN BY THE REPORTERS OF THE TORONTO NEWS.

                           EDMUND E. SHEPPARD.
                               Publisher.

                                  PRICE
                                20 CENTS.

                             THIRD EDITION.
                                  1885




THE NIGHT HAWKS OF A GREAT CITY, AS SEEN BY THE REPORTERS OF “THE TORONTO
NEWS.”


This series of sketches of the night side of life was commenced in THE
TORONTO DAILY NEWS on Monday, May 19th, concluding on June 7th. They are
but a sample of the interesting specialties which appear daily in THE
NEWS, which is certainly the most readable and spicy newspaper published
in Canada. Every Saturday, Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage’s sermon of the Sunday
before, Clara Belle’s New York letter, a cartoon by Mr. S. Hunter, and
two columns of dramatic gossip, including many glimpses of life in the
Green Room, are regularly given, besides an endless variety of humorous
sketches, and a complete compendium of the news of the day. THE NEWS has
no Canadian rival as a first-class family newspaper, one which will be
read through every day by every member of the family.

PUBLISHED BY EDMUND E. SHEPPARD, 106 YONGE STREET TORONTO.

[Illustration: SKINNING A SUCKER.—See page 8.]




READ THE TABLE OF CONTENTS


    INTRODUCTION                         1
    TOILERS OF THE NIGHT                 2
    ALL-NIGHT EATING HOUSE               3
    A HACKMAN’S EXPERIENCE               5
    BILLIARDISTIC BOYS                   6
    THE GAMBLERS                         7
    PLUCKING THE SUCKERS                 8
    THE WORK OF THE CAPPERS              9
    NIGGER LOO                          10
    SIGHTS SEEN BY THE NIGHT POLICEMAN  12
    THE SERVANT GIRL’S “FELLER”         13
    THE FINDERS                         14
    THE THIEVES                         15
    ALL NIGHT IN THE CELL               16
    THE POLICE COURT                    17
    PROMENADING THE STREETS             19
    “THE PIE-BITERS” AND BLACKMAILERS   20
    ALL-NIGHT MEETING OF THE “SALS”     22
    THE DANCE-HALLS                     23
    “MANNERS NONE—CUSTOMS NASTY”        24
    A VAG BY CHOICE                     26
    THE SLUM DWELLER                    28
    RELEASED CONVICTS                   29
    GRACE MARKS; THE GIRL MURDERESS     30
    THE BABY FARMS                      31
    IN “DE WARD”                        32
    A RUINED WOMAN                      33
    A PEST HOUSE WIPED OUT              35
    SCENES ON THE RAILWAY               36
    THE COFFIN ON THE NIGHT EXPRESS     36
    THE EMIGRANT TRAIN                  41
    THE WRECKING TRAIN                  42
    MILLER’S FIVE-CENT PIECE            43
    THE JAIL                            45
    THE STREET ARABS                    48
    HOSPITAL HORRORS                    49
    “NOBODY’S” BABIES                   52
    THE PRETTY BOY                      54
    “KEEPING IT OUT OF THE PAPER”       55
    THE SCARLET WOMAN                   57
    BEHOLD THERE MET HIM A WOMAN        58
    THE BAGNIO                          60
    A STORY OF SHAME                    62
    LUSTFUL REVELLERS                   62
    LEADING DOWN TO DEATH               63




[Illustration: BOUND FOR GLORY.—See page 22.]




TORONTO BY GASLIGHT: THE NIGHT HAWKS OF A GREAT CITY.

_Written by the Reporters of The Toronto News._




INTRODUCTION.


Night has fallen over the city. The hum of a hundred industries which
make the daytime resonant with the whirr of wheels, the clank of hammers,
and the throb of huge engines, is silent. Deserted are the factories and
workshops and warehouses, where a few hours ago all was life and stir
in the eager struggle for subsistence. The great arteries of the city’s
traffic still present a scene of animation. The stores are yet open,
and crowds, partly on business, partly on pleasure bent, throng the
sidewalks—standing densely packed at intervals round the store of some
tradesman more enterprising than his fellows, who displays amid a blaze
of light, some novel device to arrest the attention and tickle the fancy
of the passer-by. Workingmen and their wives, evidently out on a shopping
expedition, pass from one store to another in search of bargains.
Pleasure-seekers, bound for the different places of amusement, whirl past
in hacks or dismount from the humble and more economical street-car. But
the element which largely out-numbers all others is that of young men and
girls out for an evening stroll. Up and down Yonge street they pass in
parties of two and three, with frequent interchange of chaff and banter,
not always of the most refined order. There is a general aimlessness
in their demeanor as they slowly saunter along arm-in-arm, frequently
occupying the whole sidewalk, to the great annoyance of more active
pedestrians. The young fellows are mostly smoking pipes or cheap cigars
and talking loudly to their companions. Occasionally they stop for a bit
of horse-play, pushing and wrestling with each other. Now the “masher” is
in all his glory. It is not often that any self-respecting girl who goes
on her way quietly is accosted, but any lightness of demeanor on the part
of a young woman alone on the street is pretty certain to expose her to
the attentions of some lounger bedecked with cheap jewelry, who prides
himself on his fascinating powers and has an ever-ready “Good evening,
miss!” for any member of the fair sex not positively bad-looking, whose
appearance gives him courage to make an approach.


THE MASHER

is of all ages and stations. It is only the more reckless and less
experienced who venture to accost a stranger on the street without a
reasonable excuse. The old hands at the business who occupy respectable
positions in society generally assume a previous acquaintance, and if
their advances are not favorably received there is the ready excuse
of mistaken identity, “I really beg your pardon, I took you for Miss
So-and-So,” etc., and exit under cover of profuse apologies.

During the earlier hours of the evening there are kaleidoscopic changes
of scene. Sensations of all kinds draw the crowd hither and thither.
An arrest, an alarm of fire, with the rush of the engines and hook and
ladder wagons tearing like mad through the streets, a march out of the
volunteers with the inspiriting martial music of the band—any of these
distractions sift out the younger and more excitable element, who follow
at the top of their speed, leaving the streets half deserted. There is
nothing delights the rougher element more than to see an unfortunate
who has been imbibing too freely “run in.” A blue coat in charge of
anybody in fact always draws, particularly if the delinquent is noisy
and obstreperous. And a fire is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
At the first alarm the saunterers are all animation. “Where is it?”
is the question on everyone’s tongue, and as soon as the locality is
defined, away they go—fortunate if they arrive before the firemen cease
playing, for under the fire alarm system a conflagration has very little
opportunity of making headway.

Of late the Salvation Army is a frequent element in diversifying the life
of the streets after nightfall. Its parades invariably attract a crowd of
strollers, many of them of a class whom the ministrations of the regular
religious bodies do not reach. Their banners and uniform, their marching
music, and the stentorian voices of their street preachers have by this
time become a recognized and familiar feature of city life, and though
the novelty of their advent has worn off the people manifest as much
interest as ever in their sayings and doings. Their parade in the middle
of the street is accompanied by simultaneous parallel processions of a
less orderly character on the sidewalks. Whatever may be thought of the
ultimate effect of this manner of presenting religion to the mass, there
is no question that it arrests their attention.

As the night advances, the crowd thins out.


THE STREET-LOUNGERS,

male and female, disappear one by one, the stores have closed their
doors, until the only places which show signs of business activity are
here and there a saloon or a tobacco store, which may or may not have a
keg of lager on tap in the back-room or a “little game” upstairs. Now
the streets again assume for a few minutes a lively aspect as the places
of amusement are emptied of their audiences. Overladen street cars make
their final trips, toiling wearily up the ascent with frequent stoppages
as the suburbs are neared. And now the streets are almost deserted
again. Stray pedestrians hurry or totter homeward. The saloon lights are
extinguished, but acute ears can still hear the clink of glasses and
the subdued conversation of groups of revellers who are bound to make
a night of it, and are cheerfully fuddling themselves in a back room.
The wearied bar-keeper will let them out by a side door in an hour or
two. He will breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief as they stumble over the
threshold, and slipping the bolt with alacrity, to prevent any other
belated seeker after the ardent gaining entrance, he will knock down
about half of the cash the party have left, and congratulate himself on
his honesty in leaving so much for his employer.

One o’clock. The city sleeps. The few stragglers on the streets only
serve to make the general impression of silence and solitude the more
vivid by contrast. Here and there is a pedestrian on his homeward way,
or perhaps a party of two or three late roysterers laughing and bursting
into snatches of song, but growing suddenly silent and bracing up as
the measured tread of the blue-coated guardian of the night approaches.
Now and then a stray hack rumbles by, the noise of the wheels gradually
dying away in the distance and leaving no other sound audible. The night
watchman passes, carefully trying the doors of the stores and halting
for a friendly chat with the policeman on the corner of the block.
The puffing of the locomotive or steamboat engine a mile or two away,
inaudible during the day-time, sounds strangely near. Up and down the
long stretches of sidewalk hardly anyone is in sight. It is like a city
of the dead. The cold steely-blue brilliancy of the electric light makes
the darkness around their radiant circle seem denser and throws the
dark shadows of intervening objects across the street. The long rows of
gas-lamps on the side streets “pale their ineffectual fires” and present
but a sickly glimmer by contrast, and overhead shine the eternal stars,
whose distant scintillations amid the silence and darkness of midnight
have ever had power to speak from the soul of things to the soul of
man, and suggest the ever-old yet ever-new problems of life and destiny
unheard and unheeded amid the distractions of the day.




CHAPTER I.

THE TOILERS OF THE NIGHT.


When the streets leading from the center of the city are full of people
hurrying gleefully or otherwise homewards from their day’s toil, there is
another small section of the community who are hurrying in the opposite
direction. These men begin to work when all others have ceased. The
morning newspaper employes, the telegraph operators, the bakers, the
policemen, and the nightwatchmen are the most important divisions of
these toilers of the night.

In connection with the different newspaper establishments in the city
there are probably about 600 persons employed at night. These include
compositors, pressmen, stereotypers, mailing clerks, editors, reporters,
and route boys. All do not work during the same hours, but some portions
of their various tasks are accomplished when “Night draws her sable
mantle around and pins it with a star.” The compositors begin “setting”
about 7 o’clock and cease about 3. This does not comprise the whole
of their work, however, as the next day they spend two or three hours
filling up the cases which they did their best to empty the night
before. It is an exceedingly see-saw business—undoing in the day what
they performed in the night. The work is entirely by the piece, and a
fast hand makes a good wage to reward him for his toil, but this wage
represents twelve or thirteen hours of labor in the large establishments.
Many of the men think that it would be better to


RESTRICT THE HOURS OF TOIL

to ten, as they claim that bosses don’t look at the number of hours
worked, but at the money earned. The hours of the literary staff of a
morning paper are fitful and uncertain, but the general rule is that
when you are awake you had better go to work. The stereotypers get to
their cauldrons of boiling lead shortly after midnight, and the pressmen
are at their post about 3.30—just when the typo is washing his hands
and preparing to leave. The mailing clerks are the next to put in an
appearance, and almost simultaneously the little route-boy slips through
the door, prepared for his morning tramp.

About sixty-five policemen hold watch over the sleeping city by night.
Their work varies in winter and summer. Just now they remain on beat
eight hours at a stretch. In winter they are on three hours, off three
hours, and on again for the same length of time. Their work and its
incidents will form the topic of another of these sketches.

The next most important body of men, and probably more numerous, is
the bakers. It is calculated that about 300 persons find employment in
supplying our citizens with their bread. All of these, however, do not
work at night. Their labor begins about three o’clock, and they may be
seen about that hour in their floury garments hieing them to their shops.
Their work is performed in very hot rooms, and is on the whole


LABORIOUS AND MONOTONOUS.

On their skill depends one of the greatest luxuries of the table—a
well baked loaf of bread—and to their credit be it said, success very
frequently crowns their efforts.

The telegraph operators who work at night do not average over a dozen
men. This staff is lessened or increased very much in sympathy with the
quantity of dispatches which are coming in to the morning papers. When
any great event is transpiring in another land or another part of this
country, and long messages are coming in concerning it, the staff has to
be increased, and for this purpose men are drafted from the day staff.
It is an unhealthy business. In most mortality-tables, the life of the
operator shows the shortest average. Not long ago they struck for higher
wages and made a plucky fight, but monopoly was too much for them. Ever
since they have had the screws put on them pretty tightly. Reductions in
the staff and reductions in the salaries have been the order of the day.
In view of these facts some of them think that it is a good thing they
don’t live too long.

These are briefly the main facts connected with the toilers of the night,
men who work while the rest of the world are asleep—asleep feeling
assured that the telegrapher is gathering in for them the news of the
world, and that the newspaper men are printing it for them, that the
baker is preparing for them the breakfast roll, and that the policeman is
watching over their lives and their property, and keeping his weather eye
on those other people of the night, whom we are pleased to designate the
Hawks.




CHAPTER II.

AN ALL-NIGHT EATING HOUSE.


The classes about whom we have been speaking take dinner at midnight, and
for some of them at least, the eating house which keeps open till early
morning is indeed a boon. It cannot be decried therefore even though it
be a fact that the night hawks are accommodated thereby. Some of these
places keep open later than others, but, as far as I know, without
exception they are all situated on York street, and are a pleasant
substitute for the whiskey dens which used to flourish there. A series
of visits paid to these places showed that very few of the customers
belonged to the class of toilers. The prowlers of all ranks and degrees
though were well represented. The room is generally apportioned into
little stalls curtained off from the room. It is a common saying that
adversity makes strange bed-fellows, but granting that that is so, it may
also be affirmed that liquor makes strange companions. In one of these
eating houses one night there was observed in one compartment a doctor, a
lion-tamer and a tailor, all on first-rate terms; in another was observed
a commercial traveler, an Irish navvy and a tramp printer, all insisting
on


SPEAKING AT THE SAME TIME

regarding their travels, not so harmonious; in another were banqueting
three “colored pussons” discussing whether Bob Berry was not a greater
oarsman than Hanlan. The only regret experienced by the onlooker was
that he could not sprinkle the “coons” among the other feasters and thus
render the melange complete. In another room a couple of gentlemen were
seated who had been seen on more than one occasion in the police court
explaining how it was that they came to be in a room where a faro lay-out
was also found. These gentry were faring high, as the bottled beer beside
them showed. Dame Fortune had probably smiled on them and now they were
“smiling” back at her.

Oysters are very well in season, but the standard, substantial and
favorite dish at the all-night eating house is the platter of pork and
beans. To the hungry gentleman, who has probably missed his six o’clock
meal, this dish is a reviver of a distinctly perceptible kind. That man
whom you saw skip out just now came in with a weary step, but you now
see the result of his mess of lentils and swine flesh. He steps out as
briskly as a young giant refreshed with wine.

One of the most interesting characters I met with during these visits
was a shabby genteel party, who came in about one in the morning and
occupied a seat at the table at which I sat. I purposely delayed my meal
to observe this specimen. The way in which he chose and ordered his
viands from the rather limited bill of fare, showed an acquaintance of
an earlier day with Jewell & Clow, or some other swell restaurant. His
garments were a study. They were beautifully preserved, and really looked
much younger than their years. His collar, tie and cuffs were not, as
some lesser humorist has remarked before,


PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE OF A SHIRT.

A ring on his little finger would probably have brought five cents at
a second-hand dealers, but it was chosen with such taste that it might
well pass for “a ring, sir, that my father secured among the loot taken
at the fall of Delhi.” A piece of black ribbon was twisted in one of the
button-holes of his vest, but an unfortunate accident with his fork
flipped out the door-key that was attached to the other end of it.

“That’s rather a novel thing, sir,” he said to me.

“Yes,” I said, somewhat vaguely, thinking that he alluded to the
deception involved.

“I thought that was a clever thing when the idea first struck me.
Frequently in changing my dress of an evening I forgot to transfer my
latch-key from one pocket to the other, and the consequence was that I
was put to the annoyance of waking up my landlady at an unseemly hour.
The last occasion I had to do this I took out my repeater to see what the
hour was and the thought struck me that if I had my key instead of my
watch there would be no trouble. That was enough. I told my landlady my
idea and she thought it was capital, and offered to keep my watch safe
for me. I have worn the key thus ever since. I am not so particular what
time I reach my lodgings, as to be sure of getting in there when I do.”

My communicative vis-a-vis was feeding very heartily during this
interesting conversation. He went on to speak of the Egyptian war and
showed with his knife the exact position of General Gordon, and explained
lucidly and to his own entire satisfaction how the venturesome Englishman
could be rescued very easily, with a comparatively trifling expenditure of


BLOOD AND TREASURE.

This last was a favorite phrase, and he rolled it unctuously over his
tongue when his beans ran out. But his vivacity was evidently on the
wane, and he rose with a tinge of humility in his manner. He approached
the landlord and whispered something. That individual, however, did not
answer with a whisper, but said, with fair power of lungs, “Oh, that be
d⸺d for a yarn. Fork over that quarter now, and no fooling.” I could
just hear my late comrade begin a sentence with “But, my dear sir,”
when the indignant restaurateur would break in, “My dear sir nothing; I
want my money.” With this he relieved his debtor of his hat, expressing
his determination to keep it till he got paid. The shabby genteel one
had furnished a subject for one of these sketches, and thinking that
was worth something, I paid his shot and charged it to THE NEWS. He
immediately became dignified again, recovered his hat, treated the
landlord with cold disdain, and thanked me with a jaunty air, as if to
say, “Old boy, you have helped me out of a little fix; I’ll reciprocate
some other time.”

Poor devil, I saw him three hours after in an early opening bar, looking
very sleepy and fagged. He had probably been walking the streets ever
since I left him, and had taken refuge here in hopes that some fresh
stranger would ask him to take a drink of that liquid for which he had
bartered every comfort in life, and for which he will soon barter life
itself. I did not ask him why he had omitted to use his ingenious key.




CHAPTER III.

THE CABMAN’S CHATTER.


Knowing that a hackman knew as much of city life if not more, than any
other one man out of 10,000, I climbed on the box of a hack and asked an
old-timer to drive me around town.

“All right boss, get up here and I’ll drive you to the Queen’s taste.”

After some general conversation I drifted to the subject of what sights
and sounds a hackman sees and hears after nightfall.

“I’ve seen too much of that to my own sorrow, as you know,” my companion
said. “If I had seen less of it, instead of being another man’s servant,
I would have had a carriage of my own. Not that there ain’t more money to
be made at night than in the day time if a man holds a good sharp rein on
himself. A fellow that keeps his eye on the main chance and knows how to
keep a stiff upper lip will make dollars and dollars.”

“I suppose your work has given you a big insight into the wickedness of a
great city.”

“What I don’t know of the blackguards, men and women, in this town ain’t
worth knowing. I am up to every scheme that has ever been tried, I
believe. I tell you, we hackmen are about as fly as they make them.”

“You can’t all be extra ‘fly,’” I said.

“Well, there are a lot of new fellows in the business, and they are
regular chumps. It’s them that spoils everything. They don’t know the
kind of men to strike for a good fat fare, and when they do they bungle
it, and get themselves in the papers and give the hackmen a bad name. The
business is overrun. Everybody that knows how to put on a horse-collar
now wants to drive hack. They see that it is a job which there ain’t any
hard work in. But there’s any amount of dirty work for us. We’re out in
all sorts of weather, sun and rain and frost. We’re liable to be out till
all hours of the night and up by daylight the next morning to catch a
train. Then, if we want to make a cent, we have to do everything we’re
asked. It’s quite a common snap to have a stranger come to you at the
Union station and ask you to drive him up to one of them houses. Now,
just look at such work as that—acting as a bad woman’s directory. But
I don’t know of a hackman on the stand who won’t take the job. You bet
your life I make them fellows pay accordin’ to a special tariff. Do you
know, last summer I drove an old fellow from Parry Sound up to a house on
Little Nelson street. When he paid me my fare I saw he had a big wad of
bills. He told me to come back next day about two o’clock, as he wanted
to be driven to a sister of his who lived on the Kingston road. I called
for him next afternoon, but the old man was not ready to go, and would
you believe, I called for that old tarrier for five days, and on the
fifth day he didn’t have a picayune. I had to drive him to Singer’s pawn
shop, where he put up his watch and chain for money enough to take him
home. He never saw his sister, and I often wondered what yarn he told the
folks at home about his visit to town.”

“Do you suppose they robbed him?”

“Oh! not exactly robbed him, but I heard afterwards that the old fool was
offering prizes of five dollar notes for whoever could kick highest. Do
you know that if it wasn’t for the strangers half of these places would
have to shut their doors.”

“I believe you are right.”

“I know it. Why, the missuses of these places know that so well that
a hackman who always takes such fares to her place is welcome to an
occasional bottle of beer, and any driving that she has to do is given
exclusively to him.”

“Well, sir, I am sorry to have to say it, but it’s a mighty poor business
for a respectable man to have to engage in.”

“Oh, indeed, I know it, but still I discovered something worse even than
that the other night. A young fellow hired me not very long ago. He said:
‘I want to look for a certain person on King street, so I’d like you to
drive very slowly along the south side close to the sidewalk.’ I said
all right, and I did as I was told. Every once in a while he would say
‘A little slower, cabby,’ and I saw he was peering out of the window.
By gob, says I, he is some American fly-cop after someone. But I didn’t
think that long. I heard him say something, and thinking he was speaking
to me I leaned over and found he was talking to a young girl on the
sidewalk. I heard her say: ‘get out, you sneak.’ I was on to him then.
He just did it once more, when I jumps off the hack and told the girl to
stop for a second, and I would see that the man who insulted her was
punished. I hauled him out of the carriage and told him to pay me $3. He
made a grand kick. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘there will be a policeman by
here in a minute.’ That settled it. He paid me and escaped.”

“That was a case where virtue was its own reward.”

“Yes sir; three dollars for ten minutes’ work. I was telling some of the
boys on the stand about my adventure, and some of them were saying that
there was a gentleman in the town here who used his private carriage for
making mashes on young girls along the street after dark. A handsome
carriage and a pair of horses is more than some girls can resist.”

“What was the most exciting thing that ever happened you as a hackman?”

“Well now, that would be pretty hard to say. Oh, as a general thing
there is nothing ever very special happens to a hackman. The time the
block-paving was going on on King and Queen streets, last summer, I had a
funny experience. I was on the York street stand one night when a young
man with a black beard came up to me. There was a young woman with him,
not very good-looking but pretty nicely dressed. He asked for a certain
hackman. Well, we don’t care, as a rule, about putting fares out of our
own paw into that of any other driver. But this fellow happened to be
next hack to me, and heard his name. Anyway, they got in, and I heard
the man say, ‘Drive me to the Humber.’ Jim’s going away left me first
hack on the stand. I thought no more about it, but in a few minutes a
real pretty woman came up to me and described this man, and asked me if I
had seen him. I told her he had gone into a hack with a lady. You ought
just to have seen that woman’s eyes when I told her that. ‘If you can
catch—no, I think she said overtake—overtake that hack, said she, I’ll
give you $5.’ Well, now, I knew they had gone to the Humber, and I was
pretty sure they wouldn’t drive very fast, so I bundled her in and got on
the box. I wasn’t very sure how far they had got with the block-paving
on Queen street, but I wanted to strike what was fit to drive on as soon
as possible, so as to make sure I wouldn’t pass the hack. So I went
along Richmond street to Esther and when I got there I found the street
full of blocks. This kept me back, and we didn’t catch that darned hack
until we were on the lake shore road. When we got even with it I said,
‘Jimmy, stop your load, I want to speak to you a minute.’ He stopped,
and when I assisted my fare out she was trembling like a leaf. She just
went over to the other hack and looked in. I just saw her reach in her
two hands and when she took ’em out she held in them the other woman’s
hat and feathers. She threw that on the ground and trampled on them and
then reached for the other girl again. She fairly skull-dragged her out
of the hack. I believe she would have choked her if I and another cabman
hadn’t pulled her away. And do you know, that big chump in the hack never
interfered or said a word. He had a black beard and mustache, and his
face was as white as a sheet. As soon as we pulled her away she just
sat down in the sand and commenced to cry as if her heart would break.
Then the man came out of the hack and came up to her: ‘For heaven’s
sake, Kate, don’t make an exhibition of yourself,’ he said. Well, sir,
women are the darnedest fools you ever saw. If she had gone to work and
scratched the nose off her husband I’d never have interfered, but instead
of that she tackles the woman, and when that mean villain began to talk
to her and raised her up out of the sand she quieted down and drove off
with him in Jim’s hack. Oh women are queer ones. I’ll bet that she puts
all the blame on the other woman, and thought her husband was a perfect
angel, who had been led astray by a designin’ woman—that’s what they call
it. Well, I drove the girlie back to town, and when she had time to think
she was hopping mad. Every time she’d look at her mashed hat she wanted
to go and find that woman. She said she had as much right to him as the
other woman, because he paid attentions to her before he was married, and
only married the other woman because she was better fixed than she was.
‘Yes, and better looking,’ I said to myself. But the strangest thing that
happened that night was that I was so flustrated that I let that woman go
off without ever asking for my $5. But it was all right. A boy came up to
me on the stand next day and handed me an envelope with a $10 bill and a
slip of paper inside with writing on it, ‘Fare to Humber and back.’”




CHAPTER IV.

BILLIARDISTIC BOYS.


There is no amusement I can think of out of which innocent enjoyment
cannot be extracted. Personally, I can see no harm in young people
dancing or playing billiards or cards—as long as they are carried on in
the homes of these young people. As soon as our youth desire to pursue
these pleasures away from the watchful eye of their parents, so soon do
they become dangerous. The billiard halls of this city are not supported
by men, but by lads. Go to any of them, either day or night, and ten to
one you will find the majority of the players are youths not yet come
of age. A remarkably large proportion you will find to be mere boys,
and the skill with which they play seems to argue that they did not
start playing yesterday nor the day before. Just watch the swagger they
assume. The blase airs of these young cynics is an article of first-class
quality. After you have admired that, I call your attention to the cut
of the garments of these young gentlemen—very neat isn’t it—and two
or three of them sport watches, gold or silver. Then consider that it
costs these cute-looking chaps 30 cents an hour for every hour that they
occupy that table and that some of them are here every night, and you
will wonder where the wherewithal comes from. Some of them work. Some of
them don’t. In any case they must have indulgent parents, or—something.
There is a group of Upper Canada College boys round that table. No doubt
their wealthy and aristocratic progenitors make liberal allowances to
their darling boys. They play good enough to make a good showing in a
tournament. If they are as proficient regarding the angles at the base
and on the other side of the base of an isosceles triangle as they are
with the angles in and about this table they must be fine mathematicians.
There is another group playing pool. Don’t look at them too hard, because
they are chipping in ten cents on the game. One little boy who has not
been playing very long, and who I saw scoop in a “pot” shortly after I
came up stairs, has lost the joyous look that then mantled his features.
Just study that face. Look at the dreadfully anxious expression with
which he follows the movements of the ball, and as it creeps slowly
towards a pocket I believe the intensity of that boy’s will makes the
inert ivory move an inch further on, and it drops in the pocket. He
flushes up to the roots of his hair. If he gets the next ball he will
take in the “pot” again. But he is very nervous, and makes a poor shot,
and the next in hand pockets the ball. The little chap looks wistfully
at the bigger boy who took in the forty cents, and goes up and whispers
something to him. “I can’t do it Charley. You’d only lose again. You’ve
got no show with us, and you’d better get out of it while you can.”
Charley goes and sits down, feeling very bitterly I’ve no doubt. There is
the spirit of gaming in its essential characteristic—after all of your
own money is gone, borrow from anybody and everybody, and have another
hazard.

I went up to another prominent hall in the daytime, and found it filled
with youths, but they did not seem such a respectable-looking lot as
those I saw at night at the first place. They were a hoodlum lot, very
noisy, and poor players. I was much surprised. It seemed astonishing
that during the working hours there could be such a number of young men
unemployed and yet playing a game which it requires funds to engage
in. There is something very ominous about this and no one could think
otherwise than that times must be very flush indeed to permit of it.

A visit to a hall which is attached to a saloon showed me that this class
of place is patronized mainly by men, nor was there half as much noise as
in the room last mentioned. I am told that in some of these places they
merely play for the drinks, and much drunkenness is the result.

Pool is at present the most popular form of billiards among the masses.
It lends itself more readily to gambling than carom billiards, and any
person who takes observation will come to the conclusion that more of the
spirit of gaming is disseminated among our young men by this game than
by any other half-a-dozen things. It would seem to be quite as necessary
that boys should be prevented playing at all in public billiard halls, as
it is that they should be prevented buying liquor at a bar.




CHAPTER V.

THE GAMBLERS.


The life of a professional gambler is not passed in a constant whirl of
excitement, as the uninitiated may suppose; neither is it a continual
source of pleasure to him, as many of the fraternity in Toronto could
testify did they wish to relate their Police Court reminiscences, or
the enjoyment they experienced during their somewhat erratic periods of
“financial depression.” The crime of gambling at cards increases with the
growth of every city and for some reason or other the police make but
spasmodic efforts to suppress it. This appears to be especially the case
in Toronto, where the members of this thieving profession openly defy the
detectives and laugh at the puny efforts of the police constables and
their officers, who have sometimes occasion to visit the houses in search
of thieves. Neither the constables nor the detectives are to blame for
this deplorable state of affairs, but the heads of the department are,
because they know that the evil exists; know that young men are nightly
receiving their first lessons in those dishonest practices that tend to
damn their whole future prospects, and yet will not issue the mandate
that would rid the city of these unprincipled professional gamblers,
these miserable curs of society. Not long ago, at a Police Court trial,
the Magistrate remarked that he looked upon a professional gambler as a
more degraded being than a common street thief, and explained his meaning
by adding that a thief boldly takes the chances of securing his spoil
or a term in prison, while the gambler first secures the confidence of
his victim, and then by subtle cheating robs him of his money. And yet
as a Police Commissioner he details about two hundred constables and
seven detectives to hunt down the thieves, and allows the gambling hells
to flourish on the principal streets. The Magistrate is not alone in
this neglect of duty. Mayor Boswell is chairman of the Board of Police
Commissioners, and his Honor Judge Boyd sits by his side. Are these
gentlemen aware that night after night scores of young men are being


ENTICED INTO THESE DENS?

Are they aware that night after night they are exposing the children of
their old friends, perhaps their own boys, to the temptations provided
by the proprietors of these soul-destroying caves of iniquity,—to the
fascinations of the gaming table? Are they aware that many young men
highly connected in Toronto, have not only blasted their reputations and
their prospects, but have rendered themselves liable to a felon’s doom by
robbing their employers to pay an “honorable” debt at cards,—a debt never
really contracted excepting through the medium of marked cards or like
devices? If they be not aware of these things let them study the police
records, and should they not be successful in their search let them
accompany a detective on night duty in his rambles through Toronto by
Gas-light. The writer has done so on many occasions during the past ten
years, and has witnessed such scenes of dissipation, such open cheating
and deliberate robbery of inexperienced boys, and has heard so many
expressions of remorse and despair that he cannot but feel surprised that
the fathers and mothers who have wept tears of blood over their erring
and deluded boys, that the merchants who have been robbed and the victims
themselves do not rise up and demand the heads of the police department
to suppress this gigantic evil at once. Perhaps they will when Major
Draper, Chief of Police, gets tired of shooting alligators in Florida.




CHAPTER VI.

PLUCKING THE SUCKERS.


There are so many different devices resorted to by the professional
gambler in order to secure the money of his victim without showing that
he has been cheating, that it is almost an impossibility to recall
them all from memory, but a few may be noted. The game of faro was so
thoroughly described in the recent Mathieson-Kleiser Police court case
that it is only necessary to show by a single illustration how the
uninitiated can be cheated under his very nose without the slightest
danger of the dealer being detected. In playing a brace game the dealer
procures a deck known as “strippers,” which are made out of thin and
elastic cards. The deck is first cut perfectly square, and then trimmed
in such a manner as to resemble a wedge, being a trifle wider at one
end than at the other, so trifling that no one out of the secret could
notice it. It is then decided if the deck is to be arranged so as to play
one end against the other; that is the ace, deuce, tray, king, queen,
and jack against the four, five, six, ten, nine, eight. The first-named
cards, with two of the sevens, are placed together, making one half of
the deck; then the latter-named cards, with the other two sevens, which
constitute the other half of the deck, are placed together, being still
smooth and even on the edges. They are then divided equally, after which
one half is turned round, and you have a deck of “strippers,” which
the dealer can manipulate so successfully that it is impossible for a
better to win. The “capper,” who plays in with the dealer, the screw box,
sanding the cards, playing with fifty-three instead of fifty-two cards,
and preparing the cards so that two can be drawn from the box at once,
and still adhere to each other, at the will of the dealer, are a few of
the difficulties a better has to overcome before he can win any money at
faro.

The most popular game played in the city, however, is draw poker, and
this game is not confined to the gambler’s den or the club room.


IN A FRAUDULENT GAME

there are generally two or more confederates playing in with each other
as the opportunity occurs so as to rob the strangers at the table. If
the victim be very fresh the gambler simply “stacks” the cards, which is
readily accomplished by placing them in a desired position while putting
the hands that have been played in the pack. They also pass cards from
one to the other to strengthen each other’s hands, deal from the bottom
where they have cards prepared, ring in cold decks—that is, a pack of
cards all arranged to suit the gambler, and exactly similar in appearance
to the ones in use—utilize the false cut, and make “strippers” out of,
say, four aces and four tens, so that the gambler is always sure of a
“full” hand or four of a kind; but the most ingenious method of fleecing
a young player is by using “marked” cards. To all appearances the backs
of these cards are covered simply by a fancy pattern, but the gambler
can read them off as he deals as readily as if he were looking at their
faces, so that he knows the other players’ hands before the player
himself can read them off. It requires but seventeen different marks to
a pack, four marks to designate the suits, and thirteen to designate the
cards in each suit. The mark will generally be found in the shape of a
heart, diamond, spade, or club worked ingeniously into the scroll work,
but some times an old hand at cheating will buy a pack with marks that
require a “key” before they can be deciphered.




CHAPTER VII.

THE WORK OF THE “CAPPERS.”


Standing at the entrance to a prominent hotel on King street one summer
evening some years ago were two stylishly-dressed young men, each with
nobby canes, which they twirled carelessly as they nonchalantly puffed
away the smoke from their cheroots, gorgeous jewelry and moustaches
waxed out to a point as fine as a needle. To the envious and hard-worked
store clerk they appeared to be gentlemen in looks, thoughts, actions,
and living. To the detective, who was watching them, they were known
as miserable stool-pigeons, “cappers” for a notorious gambling hell,
situated in rear of a King street building, on the lookout for victims.
And it was these vile, heartless scoundrels that caused George Reynott’s
ruin. His father was a well-to-do merchant in a country town near Guelph
who had sent George to the city to gain a metropolitan experience in a
wholesale dry goods house, but it would have been better had George been
satisfied to remain at home with his father in the town where he was
such a favorite. He was barely twenty-four years of age, frank in manner
and pleasing in address, with a temperament not suited to withstand the
temptations of city life. He came to the city with a light heart, full
of energy and with bright hopes for the future. Now he is a broken down
gambler, inebriate and burglar, serving out a ten years’ term in Joliet
prison, while his aged father lies in a grave prepared for him by his
son’s follies and crimes. The writer knows not when the “cappers” first
made George’s acquaintance, but the detective states that he had seen
the trio together several times in saloons and billiard parlors, where
they occasionally played a five-cent game of “shell out.” Gradually
George became imbued with a desire to see more of the world, and his
wily companions, knowing that his father kept him well supplied with
money, gave impetus to this desire by relating surprising stories of
midnight escapades, card parties and champagne suppers. When the poor
deluded victim first commenced to handle the ivory chips is not known,
but in a very short time he became one of the most constant visitors to
the luxuriously furnished hell. His repeated requests for money alarmed
his father, and his frequent absences from work annoyed his employers to
such an extent that they finally wrote to the father. The letter had its
effect. Mr. Reynott came to the city, and after a conversation with the
wholesale firm consulted a detective, who explained just how far George
had gone.


THE SCENE BETWEEN FATHER AND SON

was a painful one, but it ended happily, the latter having promised never
to touch a card again. He meant at the time to keep his word, but in less
than a month the “cappers” regained their old influence over him, and
he became more fascinated than ever with gaming. When he was unable to
get more money from his father he pawned his jewelry, until one night he
took the second decided step in the downward path. There were five seated
at a table, George among them, two being strangers, and the other two
being regular “skins,” when the writer entered the room, but they were
so engrossed with their play that they paid no attention to the visitor.
It was draw poker, twenty-five-cent ante and five dollars limit, and
much to the surprise of at least one person in the room, George was away
winner, having half a dozen stacks of chips in front of him, along with
a roll of bills and a pile of silver. His face was deeply flushed, his
eyes sparkled, and his whole frame quivered with the intense excitement
that consumed him, but when the “luck” commenced to turn, and he saw his
chips and bills gradually fading away, a ghastly pallor spread over his
face, driving back the gambler’s blood to his heart. The “skins” had
been utilizing a pack of “markers,” and in order to rob the strangers
had first dealt George the winners, so as to more securely hide their
villainy, and had then fleeced him at their leisure. When the unhappy
young man found himself completely ruined, with his I.O.U. for $25 in the
hands of one of the gamblers, he was filled with a great remorse, and
wept like the child he really was. He felt that he must pay the debt of
“honor” contracted over the poker table or be


DISGRACED AMONG HIS “FRIENDS.”

And he did pay it, but at the expense of his honesty and his employers.
He stole goods from the store, pawned them to pay his gambling debt,
was found out, and would have been sent to jail but for the respect the
employers had for the father. After this exploit the reckless young man
went headlong to the devil. He became a frequenter of the lowest gambling
dens in the city, practised “skin” games till he became as skilful as his
old-time “cappers,” and his passion for the card table became so strong
that when he could find no other game he would take a hand at “nigger
loo” with the most notorious colored gang in the city. By this time his
stakes had dwindled down from a $10 bet to one cent ante and fifty cents
limit. He needed the balance of his cash for whisky! Three months ago
the writer saw George Reynott making his way with “kindly curves” to a
gambling house on King street. Last week a dispatch announced that he had
been sent to Joliette prison for ten years for burglary.

       *       *       *       *       *

Such is the brief history, and a true one it is, of a young man who, but
for those miserable scoundrels known as “cappers,” might have become a
respectable member of society. Nor is this a solitary case. The gambling
hells are nightly visited by young men well connected and refined in
manner, but they are unable to resist the fascination of a game at poker.
They play, and play high. They are on small salaries; where do they get
the money?




CHAPTER VIII.

NIGGER LOO.


There are gamblers and gamblers, but in the expressed opinion of his
Worship they are all thieves. Some affect good manners, society, and
clothes, wear genuine diamonds, and claim for themselves the credit of
never taking part in a “crooked” transaction, either over the table or
away from it. They do not even openly associate with their “cappers,” but
leave these sneaks to do the dirty work, paying them a small percentage
of the winnings therefor. They follow the “circuit,” attend all the
race meetings on both sides of the line, and are looked upon with favor
by sporting men. They are lavish in their expenditure and generous to a
fault with each other on the street. But alas for their good impulses!
Every generous thought fades away more completely than a misty dream
when they face each other at the poker table, and when they succeed in
roping in a wealthy “sucker,” they become night-hawks indeed, and swoop
down on their unsuspecting prey with a force and ferocity that cannot be
resisted. All thieves? Aye, cruel, heartless thieves.

There are other gamblers who affect—nothing. Too strongly in love
with whisky to have much money, they simply drift on and on until
the drunkard’s grave or a government prison affords them a harbor of
refuge. And yet, even these poor whisky-soaked half-crazed wretches,
who are not possessed of spirit enough to look an honest man in the
face, are thieves. They cannot play poker in the “gentleman” gambler’s
den, so they repair to the house of a colored man and by their superior
skill in manipulating the cards fleece their darker-skinned, but not
blacker-hearted brethren, out of the few pieces of silver they succeed in
earning during the day.

Yet it is hardly a step from the gambler’s palace to the drunken crook’s
den, and when the visitor passes in his tour of inspection from one to
the other no feeling of surprise comes over him. The same kind of people
are in attendance, are playing poker, and if they have not pat hands
lying on their laps it is because they keep them concealed in their vests
or down the back of their necks. You know even a gambler is allowed to
smooth his shirt-front or adjust his collar when he wishes. The same kind
of people, with faces a little more bloated and blotched, perhaps, and
the lines showing more clearly the unmistakable


SIGNS OF DISSIPATION

and debauchery, but the very same kind of people. There is no place in
the world better adapted for the study of human nature than in the poker
room. So the reader may accompany a detective and the writer to one of
the most notorious “nigger dives” in the city. It is a queer-looking
attic about the size of a large cupboard, and is illuminated in daylight
by a four-pane window that commands a picturesque view of outhouses and
filthy yards. It is one of those noisome chambers upon the very threshold
of which a sensitive person will probably recoil in natural disgust. The
paper on the wall, or what remains of it, is discolored and greasy, and
the table, once a light oak, has been blackened by the action of time and
dirt, the unbrushed sleeves of the gamesters, tobacco smoke, and beer
stains. There were five people, two white men and three “coons,” seated
at the table when the visitors managed to overcome their first feeling
of disgust, and enter the room. Phew! It was worse than executing a
search-warrant in a York street junk-shop. They were playing poker, and
paid no attention to the detective, when they found he was not followed
by a posse of police.

“It’s all right, Slick; only showing a friend of mine around a bit.”

“Good enough, boss; thought as you’se gwine to pull de ranch. Make y’seff
to hum.”

That being impossible in so small and filthy a hole, the visitors
squeezed themselves as near to the open window as possible, and watched
the game. It was evident at a glance that the white men were proficients
in the art of cheating, and that the “coons” knew they were exercising
their arts, but


THE FASCINATION THAT LED THEM

to the table kept them still in their seats. The deals go on, and as
piece after piece of silver crosses from the stakes of the blacks to
the whites, the silence becomes still more ominous, and the glitter of
three pairs of rolling black eyes becomes more dangerous. The first
coon deals the cards and all pass out, the next taking up the pack with
a like result. Coon No. 3 clumsily shuffles the pasteboards, but does
his “stacking” so poorly that every one gets on to his racket, to use a
gambler’s phrase, and passes out. Now comes a jack-pot, where every one
antes till the game is opened. The pack circulates three times, and no
one will open it, although the onlookers see a pair of aces in one hand
which disappear in a most mysterious manner. The expression on the faces
of the whites differs widely. One is as cool as if he were engaged in a
game of euchre for the drinks; the lips of the other twitch nervously,
his face is as pale as the whisky blotches will allow it to be, and his
eyes have a peculiar shifting motion, as if he apprehended danger. But
look at the coons! Their wooly heads are pushed forward till their necks
look as long as a plumber’s bill, their protruding eyes are as stationary
as a fascinated gamester at a faro table, and their great flat nostrils
are dilated so as to almost engulph their mobile lips, from which no
sounds are issued. The pot is a large one for such a small game, and
when the imperturbable white leans over and calmly observes, “I’ll open
it for a dollar,” there is a dead silence, followed by a sudden move on
the part of the largest coon, who leaps to his feet, and with flaming
eyes, yells,

“No you don’t, honey; you squidged dose keerds.”

Every man makes a grab at the pile in the center of the table, which is
overturned with the lamp, and in the


EGYPTIAN DARKNESS

that ensues a general fight occurs. The writer cannot say who got hurt;
he got his body out of danger by changing venue to the roof. When he
returned the crowd were equally dividing the money and the imperturbable
white was disgorging aces and kings from behind his neck and out of his
vest and sleeves.

       *       *       *       *       *

If it were possible to confine gambling at cards to the professional
gamblers, there would be no cause for complaint, but as this is an
impossibility, the Police Commissioners should take steps to protect
young men who are first innocent victims and afterwards by their
experience become villainous cheats. It is a well-known fact that poker
is largely played in private houses and at some of the clubs, but with
these cases the police are powerless to deal, and it is only public
sentiment that will break them up. In some of the hotels, too, rooms are
set apart for card-playing, but as the Magistrate has stated that, on a
hotelkeeper being convicted of such an offence, he will annul the liquor
license, it is safe to conclude that the business is not carried on on
a very large scale. The Police Commissioners have it in their power to
keep many young men from being decoyed headlong to destruction. Will
they exert that power by arresting these “cappers” and unscrupulous
night-hawks as vagrants, if they cannot catch them gambling, and give
them a term of imprisonment without a fine after the first conviction?

In conclusion it may be remarked that gambling is not the only offence
of the gambler against public morals. Many of them shun drink, and only
indulge in occasional excesses in this direction, but all of them,
without exception, are frequenters of immoral houses. When a gambler
makes a haul his first impulse is to repair to the bagnio, where he finds
creatures who will welcome him when he is flush. The debasing nature of
gaming is shown in the one fact that the money won is largely spent in
the indulgence of guilty pleasures.




CHAPTER IX.

THE NIGHT POLICEMAN.


“Come along Teraulay street,” said a night policeman the other night to
me, “you may as well go that way to the office as any other.” It was
after one o’clock in the morning, it was a starless night, our footsteps
echoed strangely from the houses, millions of unseen spirits were opening
with noiseless fingers the swelling buds of the horse-chestnuts over
head, and, in short, the night policeman by my side wanted to chat and
thus pass some of the time away. I was not slow in taking advantage of
the humor he was in.

“I suppose you have some queer experiences patrolling through the ward at
night,” I put in as a starter.

“Indeed I have,” he replied as he adjusted his cape over his shoulders,
“yes indeed. You would hardly believe me if I told you some of them. See
here, Kate,” addressing a woman who was slinking past in the shadows,
“You had best get under cover somewhere. If I see you again I’ll run
you in, mind that.” The woman scuttled away in the darkness, and the
policeman, catching step with me again, continued, “Yes, it’s a queer
life we lead out in the street at night, and it’s queer things we hear
and it’s queer people we see. Why, it’s not half an hour ago that I was
seeing down that street yonder when I heard a woman’s screams and cries
of murder. I could hear the sound of vicious blows, and was not long in
locating the house.

“The screams grew louder, and, drawing my baton, I made a rush against
the door and burst it open. As I entered the little hall the light in a
back room was put out. I struck a match, and going through lit a lamp on
the table. Well, sir, it was


A QUEER SIGHT.

A woman was crouching on the floor in her nightdress. Her face was
swollen and bleeding, and there was a cut on her head. Her white garment
was spotted with blood, and she was groaning with pain. In the corner
stood her husband, a big, ugly fellow half dressed.

“What are you killing your wife for, Bill?” says I, “You’ll have to come
with me.”

“I never struck her,” says he.

“Indeed that’s true, sir,” said the woman, “I fell down the cellar stairs
in the dark.”

“But I heard you yelling murder outside.”

“Sir, you must have been mistaken, I never cried murder. Did I, Bill.
’Pon my word, sor, it was by falling down the stairs I got hurt.”

“‘Show me the stairs,’ says I, and would you believe it, there isn’t a
cellar in the place, nor stairs neither!”

“Did you arrest him?”

“Naw! where would be the use? She would come up in the morning and swear
a hole through a brick wall that he never put a hand on her, and where
would I be?—I’d look like a fool, and I would be reprimanded for bringing
a case like that into court. Yes, I left them there, and as I was goin’
out, what do you think but the fellow followed me and threatened to have
me before the commissioners for breaking in his door. There are lots of
scenes like that, lots of ’em. Why I have heard the devil’s own ruction
going on in a house, and when I went in there they were all sitting among
a lot of broken furniture, as mum as mice and ready to swear that they
hadn’t opened their mouths to speak for twenty-four hours.”

“What about burglars?”

“I have had some queer experiences. Ha! ha! One moonlight night I was
pacing on my beat, when I saw a dark figure leap over a fence that
surrounded the handsome premises of a wealthy lawyer. I went to the fence
and looked over, but it was dark on the terrace and I could see nothing.
In a few minutes, however, I saw


THE DARK FIGURE OF A MAN

crawling stealthily along the veranda and enter through an open window,
and in a few minutes a faint light shone out. Fortunately I could hear in
the distance a footstep which I rightly judged was the policeman on the
other beat. I went up a block, called him, and the two of us returned to
the scene of operations. After consultation I put my comrade to watch the
window while I went round the house. I found a room on the ground floor
dimly lit. I tapped on the window and in almost a moment I heard a man
get out of bed and come to the window. It was the man of the house. He
recognized me at once. I whispered to him that I had seen a man climbing
through one of his up-stair windows. He never said a word, but beckoned
me round to the front of the house and let me in. I told him what part of
the house it was in, and we went softly up stairs. We could hear no noise
nor did we meet anyone. We went in softly through a long corridor, and
descending three steps entered what I took to be the servants’ quarters.
Suddenly my companion touched me on the arm and pointed to a strip of
light under a door. We both came closer, and could hear a whispering
inside. I asked him if I would burst the door, and he nodded. I drew back
as far as I could, and then launched myself with all my force against the
door, which gave way easily, and we both sprang into the room.”

“Did you catch the burglar?” I inquired, as the policeman started to wipe
his lips and look up at the sky.

“You bet we did. He was easy caught. In fact, he and the housemaid
were—well, this is a queer world.


SUCH A SCENE

I never saw. The girl wept, implored, prayed and finally went into a fit.
The “burglar” got down on his knees and begged for mercy, and the lawyer
stormed and swore and finally laughed. The whole house was roused, and
some of the women came in and cared for the wretched girl.”

“Did you arrest the fellow?”

“No, the lawyer was satisfied with kicking the fellow into the street,
and bundling the girl after him on the next morning, and that was the
whole of it. It turned out that he had been in the habit of visiting her
in this way for months, and he would not have been caught that time had
it not been for the bright moonlight. He might have known better, but
when a fellow makes up his mind to see his girl he will undergo any risk
no matter what it is. I often meet him, and he looks mighty sheepish, I
can tell you. See that high door-step?”

“Which, this one?” “Yes.”

“Well, one frightfully cold night last winter I sat down on that
door-step a moment to make an entry in my book. I had hardly seated
myself when


I THOUGHT I HEARD BREATHING.

I was puzzled for a moment, and looked all around, but couldn’t make out
where the sound came from. Finally I decided it was under the door-step.
I got down, reached under and pulled out two little children, a boy and a
girl, half naked and nearly frozen. I took them to the station, where we
thawed them out and saved their lives. They had been put out half-dressed
by their drunken step-father, the poor little things had crept under the
door-step for shelter, and if I had not found them when I did they would
have been frozen to death as sure as fate. See that lane?”

“Yes.”

“Caught a burglar in there in great shape. I was coming along very
quietly one night when I ran against a fellow coming out of the lane. He
made some excuse and hurried away as quick as he could, and after he got
some distance he gave a loud and peculiar whistle. I felt that something
was wrong, and went down the lane a little piece to where there was a
high board fence. Some one called out, ‘Are you there Flight?’ I answered
‘yes,’ and then he said ‘look out and catch,’ and the next moment he
threw a bundle of stuff over the fence, and it fell right into my arms.
He threw over another bundle, and then he climbed over himself, when I
collared him. He was the most surprised burglar you ever saw. I took both
him and the bundles to the station, and he got two years. I never found
out who the other fellow was, but he was no good anyhow, or he would have
risked himself to warn his mate in some fashion.

“Yes,” said the policeman, as he went softly up a couple of steps, tried
a door, and then resumed his walk. “We have some mighty unpleasant
experiences. ‘Pulling a house,’ as they call it, is not to my taste, but
we’ve got to do it, all the same. We never know anything about it till
we are paraded at twelve o’clock and marched away in a body. The house
to be raided is then surrounded, men being placed in the rear and at
all points of exit, the rest accompanying the sergeant into the house.
Sometimes there is a great hullabaloo, but generally they keep mighty
quiet. The last house I helped to raid was on ⸺ street. It was a mighty
cold night, and they had no suspicion of what was going to happen. The
house was pretty full and so were the inmates, and they were dancing and
raising particular Cain. When the sergeant rang the bell they didn’t
stop, but after the woman of the house had peeped out and seen the police
she gave one yell, and that settled it. We pushed in, and could see them
dashing up stairs and flying for the rear of the house on all sides. One
young fellow took it quite philosophically, lighting a fresh cigar and
awaiting further developments. Those who ran out the back way were netted
easily, and were brought back looking mighty crestfallen. None of the
girls tried the escape dodge—they simply broke for their rooms to secure
their valuables. Two who had never been arrested before set up a most
lugubrious howling. They threw themselves down on the floor, tore their
hair, and cut up bad. Another girl swore a steady stream of oaths for
half an hour, while the rest cut jokes with us to cover their chagrin.
The sergeant found one man under the bed. He hauled him out by the heels,
and the expression on that fellow’s face when the sergeant yanked him to
his feet by the collar, would make a dog laugh. Another fellow had been
hid his girl in a narrow closet, and when found he was bleeding at the
nose. In a little while he would have been smothered. It was rather a
queer procession back to the station. Some of them were singing, others
crying, while the rest of them were swearing like dock-wollopers.”


A CUTE GIRL.

“One morning about two o’clock I was pacing my beat in a neighborhood
where a large number of wealthy people resided. All at once I saw a
female figure coming swiftly towards me, and when she reached me she
proved to be a young and very handsome girl. She was all out of breath
and greatly excited. She could hardly speak for a moment, and then she
gasped out that some one had broken into her house and was raising a
disturbance. ‘He threatened to kill me, sir; come along and arrest him.’
I never hesitated to go with the woman, and I started off. She took me
away three or four blocks, and brought me into a house where a dim light
was burning. There were a few dishes smashed on the floor, and some of
the furniture was overturned, but that was all. We searched the house and
the premises, but could find nobody, and after wasting about an hour I
returned to my beat. Would you believe it? Two of them houses had been
burglarized during my absence, and over $3,000 worth of stuff carried
off.”

“And the woman—?”

“The woman steered me away from the spot while they went for the swag—you
bet I’m not fooled like that again.”

“Did you have her arrested?”

“Pooh! what good would that do, man? She would have stuck to her story,
and that would settle it. There would be simply a suspicion that her
little yarn to me that night was made up, but no jury or magistrate would
convict her.”


THE FINDERS.

“Hullo!” said my policeman friend as he glanced across at a house where a
light suddenly appeared in one of the windows, “the finders are getting
up.”

“Finders; what are finders?” I inquired.

“It’s no wonder you ask the question. It’s astonishing the different ways
that some people do make their living in this city. A finder is a man who
makes his living by finding things.”

“Go on.”

“The finders are chiefly colored people, living in the Ward. They sally
out just at daybreak, and dividing up into squads, slowly patrol Yonge,
King and Queen streets on both sides. As they stroll along they carefully
scrutinize the sidewalks, alley entrances, door ways and the gutter in
search of lost articles, money, etc.”

“I wouldn’t think they would make much at that kind of work?”

“Yes, but they do. You have no idea of the amount of things lost on these
streets at night. A drunken man may sprawl into the gutter and lose his
watch, purse or some other valuable. He gathers himself up and goes on.
In the dark the article is not noticed, but the first break of dawn
reveals it to the professional finder. A drunken man may stumble into
an alley and lose his hat, the professional finder gets it at daylight.
Thieves arrested on the streets often stealthily throw valuables they
have stolen into the gutter, and there they are sure to become the prey
of the finder. A thief being pursued will throw away his revolver that
would tell against him and the finder gets it in the morning. Oh, I tell
you they sometimes come home with quite a boodle, and no one can say but
they get it honest enough.

“Strange things occur on the streets, and some robberies have their funny
side. One night a couple of crooks met a lawyer from a country town not a
thousand miles from Toronto, very drunk in Osgoode lane. He was sitting
down on a heap of stones, and wasn’t able to get on his feet. He implored
them to take him where he could sleep. They took him up the lane a piece
and then told him that he was in their room, and that he was to undress
and get into bed. He with many protestations of gratitude prepared
himself for rest, and his two friends bidding him good-night, and hoping
that he would sleep well, and further promising to call him early, walked
off with his hat, clothes, and boots, which were found in a pawn-shop
next morning, where they had got $2 on them. The stranger wandered around
till a good-natured laborer going early to work discovered him and took
him into his house. The lawyer repaid him well for it afterwards. I know
the fellows who did the deed, but they were never arrested, as the lawyer
did not wish it, and by the way he has never drank a drop of liquor
since.”




CHAPTER X.

THE SERVANT GIRL’S “FELLER”


The millionaire and the shivering beggar at his gates may differ in every
other respect, but they have one feeling in common. Both desire to live,
and to live one must eat. The most important concern of mankind, then,
is to get something to eat. It is open to all to secure this desideratum
by labor of one kind or another. Men choose different avocations to
this end. One goes down in a drain at 7 o’clock in the morning and
throws dirt till six at night, and gets a dollar and a quarter for it.
Another creeps down to a store in the dark and silent hours of the
morning, and by the aid of a jimmey and a bit and brace secures a sum
varying in amount from a few dollars up to several thousands. These are
representatives of two great classes in the community—the toilers of the
day and the prowlers of the night. There are all degrees of prosperity
in the ranks of the former and all depths of vileness and degradation
in those of the latter. During the day they are distinctly apart. The
banker, the lawyer, and the shop-man pass the gambler and the procuress
on the streets and know them not. But when night assumes his dim dominion
over the world smug respectability may be seen watching with bated breath


THE RATTLING OF THE DICE

upon the table or dallying with sin in the by-ways of the city.

Thus they sometimes mingle, surreptitiously and fearfully.

The night hawks! They are to be found in every great city. They are the
excrescences of civilization. In cities of great population they are a
constant menace to the public peace. Toronto is, perhaps, no worse or no
better in this respect than other cities of equal population. That we
have a sufficient number of these birds of darkness the police assert,
and the newspaper man, whose duties take him occasionally to their
haunts, knows. They are a strange race with a terrible philosophy.

“Why don’t you brace up?” was asked of a young man who looked pretty
miserable in the early morning. He was evidently suffering from the
effects of his last night’s orgies.

“I wish somebody would give me a chance to brace up,” was the answer
given, with a weary smile. “I know a nice bar where we could both brace
up.”

“Well, now, joking aside, you know your present life is killing you. You
are still a young man; you have a good trade. Why don’t you get to work
and avoid all this trouble. Compare yourself with that young fellow on
the other side of the street with his dinner can. His eye is clear; his
tongue is clean and his lips are moist. Are yours?”

“That’s very well put, but that story has got two sides. I’m feelin’ a
little tough now; but by noon I wouldn’t change places with Vanderbilt.
Ten minutes after I get my first rye I’ll be in as good shape as the coon
with the dinner-pail; then he’ll have to sweat and work all day while I
lay off beside a cool keg of lager or other choice stimilants. You can’t
preach to me about


THE ADVANTAGES OF HONEST LABOR.

I have tried it. You work nine hours a day and get spoken to like a dog.
For this you get three meals a day and a bunk to sleep in at night. Your
first meal you haven’t time to eat, the second is cold and tastes of the
tin pail in which it is carried, and the third is a mess made up of what
was left by your boardin’-house missus and her youngsters at their last
meal. I tell you I may not get my meals reg’lar, but they’re daisies when
I do.”

It was hard to decide what to say to talk like this. It was suggested,
however, that in one plan of existence there was a prospect of long life
and the respect of your fellowmen; in the other there was simply death
and disgrace.

“Respect be d⸺d. The kind of respect a man gets who has no money is not
worth much. If I cracked a bank safe, and snaked a million dollars out of
it, I’d get all the respect from my neighbors that any man gets. As for
long life, I wouldn’t want to live long if I had to work 60 hours a week
for the pleasure of eating three poor meals a day.”

This, or something similar, is the philosophy of the hawks. It is summed
up in the phrase “a short life and a merry one.” It is a rule of life
which makes a man, presumably civilized, more dangerous than a savage. He
has the instincts of the savage combined with more knowledge and power
for evil. It is a philosophy which every right-thinking man should do his
little all to combat. It aims at the foundations of society, and if its
falsity could be made apparent in words of fire, the human family would
be a gainer thereby.

It is surely not making too bold an assertion to say that the most
hardened enemy of society was


ONCE A GUILELESS CHILD.

He or she must have at some particular time taken his or her first step
on the road to infamy. Some particular form of allurement must have
caught the youthful eye and dazzled the foolish brain. What are these
allurements? Can our youth be made to recognize them and see whereunto
they lead? We think they can. It would be well to show that the roses
of sin bear fearful thorns, that the fruits of mere worldly pleasure
turn to bitter ashes on the lips. The series of articles which are being
published in these columns have this end in view. By showing how the
vicious live we expect to show that the person who chooses to tread the
way of vice will find it broad enough in all conscience with a-plenty of
wayfarers in it, but he will also find that the thorns and cruel stones
increase with each mile, until its final pages are trodden with bleeding
feet and washed with unavailing tears. It can be shown, we think, that
all the vicious classes simmer down at last to the same shuffling,
shambling level. The young gambler, his tailor’s pride, degenerates into
the sniveling aged tramp, who in fluttering rags begs for a crust of
bread at the poorhouse door, or else his elegant limbs wear penitential
uniform behind the prison bars. The descent of the wicked woman is still
more awful, still more shocking.

In these sketches our readers may hope, not for cooked reports to support
any particular view of life and its relations, but for actual facts
witnessed by our own staff, or else the views of people having knowledge
or experience of the things whereof they speak. It is better in these
things to speak so plainly that everybody may see where the disease lies,
and thereby form a better idea of how a remedy may be applied.




CHAPTER XI.

ALL NIGHT IN THE CELLS.


The numerous police stations of the city, and especially the Central
station are on account of the news and incidents which surround them,
favorite fishing grounds for the reporters. There is scarcely an hour
of the day or night, that a reporter alert, watchful and ever ready
for business, may not be found in the Central station ready to pick up
the slightest item of news and bear it in all haste to the paper he
represents. The reporters know the working of each station almost as well
as the officer on duty. I was standing one night on the corner of Jordan
and King streets when I observed four young men coming from the direction
of Bay street. They were all more or less intoxicated, but one of them, a
young man whom I knew well and who I was aware seldom touched liquor was
the drunkest of the lot. He was quarrelsome and very noisy, and it was
not long before I saw the dark figures of two policemen crossing from the
corner of King and Yonge towards the group. One of them expostulated with
the young man, but he became indignant, then abusive, and was finally
arrested and taken to No. 1 station. I followed the party, and when we
entered the inspector’s office I could see by the bewildered look in
the unfortunate young man’s eyes that he had never been there before.
He was led to the railing round the inspector’s desk, and that officer
studied him coolly for a moment through the little wicket, and then
demanded his name. The young man gave it mechanically, and in the same
way told the place of his birth, his age, religion and employment. Then
the orderly on duty went through his pockets, took from him his knife,
watch and chain, money, papers, pipe and tobacco, and other articles,
and then with a gruff “Come on, here,” led him down. His arrest, his
march through the gaping crowd in the brightly lit streets, his search
upstairs, the subdued remarks of the police on duty, and the bitter clang
of the iron door behind him had evidently sobered him. His heart is like
water in him, and he feels his blood course chilly in his veins as he
stands aghast, gazing about him in the strange place. The concrete floor,
the row of iron doors, and oh, horror! worse than all, the battered old
drunk, who comes reeling towards him with a “Hello, old feller, you in
too? Shake!” fills him with a convulsive dread, a nameless terror that
sets the cold sweat oozing from every pore in his clammy skin.

He shrinks from the repugnant old drunk with a shiver of loathing and
flings himself down on a bench in a paroxysm of bitter tears. Yes, weep
poor wretch! Down on your knees—down on your knees in this foul place and
float your prayers to heaven. You are a young man yet, yours may not be
unavailing tears, the best years of your life are before you—down on your
knees!

The old drunk comes stumbling forward. “Wash yer cryin’ for? Brash up,
brash up—it’s all in a life time, look at me.” Yes, look at him! He’s
a dandy! His face is gray with drink, there are blood lines in the
yellowish white of his dim, dry eyes, his beard and hair unkempt, his
clothes muddy and tattered, and his shoes all broken. But the miserable
old creature means well with the youth. “Brash up I shay, the world owes
ush a living, an’ we’re goin’ through the world for the lash time.”

Going through the world for the last time! Ah!

The young man leaps to his feet with a fresh sensation of horror. What
means that sound of struggling on the stairway—those fearful curses
and frenzied cries of helpless rage that make his muscles quiver? The
officers are dragging a fresh victim to the cells. He struggles with his
captors every inch of the way. The door is flung violently open, and
the wretch is thrown into the room. Is this a man or a lower species
of beast? Its face is covered with blood, its matted hair stands stiff
about its head, its eyes flash fire, and its covering is in tatters. The
police drag it to a cell, shut it in, lock it up, and then, flushed and
panting, stand looking in at it with an expression on their faces that we
might expect to see on that of a hunter who had meshed a lion. Yes, it
is a man—no other animal can curse. He springs to his feet with a hoarse
roar, and taking the bars in his hands, shakes the gate with the strength
of a maniac. He paces up and down his narrow cell, uttering wild cries
of vengeance, till at last he falls upon his bench exhausted, and his
labored breathing tells that he is asleep. More drunks! all noisy, all
battered. One of them wants to embrace the young man, who springs from
him with a cry of downright fear. Then the affectionate drunk becomes
indifferent and wants to thump him, but, fortunately, he is too drunk
to carry it out. The door opens, and a man comes in quietly this time.
His hat is pulled down over his evil eyes and as he slinks to a corner
“common thief” is marked on every inch of him. The affectionate drunk
wants to embrace him also, but the thief rises with a growl and threatens
to hit him a crack on the nose if he doesn’t go and lie down and give him
a rest. The door opens again, and a fashionably-dressed gambler comes in,
whose last word to the officer at the door is to “Send for Tommy; he’ll
bail me out.” The affectionate drunk stands in awe of the newcomer’s good
clothes, and the thief, with a side glance at his stylish pin, shrugs
his shoulders, pulls his slouch hat further down over his eyes, and
settles himself for a sleep. The gambler goes into an open cell and lies
down, but I the young man paces the room with clenched hands and fevered
heart. And so the weary night wears on, and as the gray morning touches
the windows with its cool fingers one by one the drunks rouse themselves
from their sleep and shuffle over to the water tap to quench the burning
thirst that consumes their throats. Even these wretches can joke in their
misery.

“That was a surprise party to your stomach, I bet,” says one, as he
watches another take his first eager gulp of water, which fairly turns to
steam as it goes hissing down his fevered throat.

“Wouldn’t a big John Collins go good now, eh?”

“Or a brandy and soda, yum, yum!”

“Water’s a good thing to wash with,” says another boozer, as he lays down
the cup and shakes his head, “but it’s no good to drink, not much.”

Then they get sympathetic and friendly.

“What do you expect to get?” says one.

“Oh, sixty days this crack, nothing less.”

“Been up before?”

“Have I? Humph! The old man’ll spot me as soon as I get into the
bull-pen.”

“What kind ov a police magistrate have yez in this blasted town?” asks a
boozer from the bench.

They all look at him admiringly, enviously.

“Never up before?”

“Never struck the darn town in my life till last night, and betcher life
I’ll git outen it, too, as soon as I git out o’ jail.”

“You’ll git off on yer fust offence,” chorus the rest, and they look upon
him as a company of paupers would look on one of their number who had
been left a legacy. By this time the sun fills the streets, the tide of
life roars past, and the group of wretches await the peal in St. James’
steeple announcing a quarter to ten.




CHAPTER XII.

THE POLICE COURT.


My experience as a police court reporter is considerable, and in this
sketch I propose to give the readers of THE NEWS a sketch of the
Magistrate’s morning levee, in which those of the night who hawks come to
grief during the hours of darkness appear to explain their shortcomings.

In the first place a description of the surroundings of the Police Court
might, and doubtless will, be of interest to those who have neither the
opportunity nor the inclination to visit the place and inspect it for
themselves. The court room is not unlike court rooms all over the world.
There is the raised dais for the presiding magistrate, there is the
little pen in front and immediately below it for the clerk of the court.
There is the table in front of that for the lawyers, the table for the
reporters, the prisoners’ dock facing the magistrate, and the railing
through the center of the room to keep back the great unwashed. To the
right of and below the magistrate, behind a little screened desk, sits
the deputy-chief or the inspector on duty, with the prisoners’ docket
before him. And that is about all. The court opens with the regularity
of clock-work at ten a.m. precisely, but the doors are unlocked at about
half-past nine. Shortly afterwards


THE REGULAR HABITUES

of the court begin to arrive. People slip in by degrees and take their
seats in that portion of the room reserved for the public. Here comes a
poor, pale-faced woman, meanly clad and sick-looking, who with her thin,
trembling hand vainly tries to conceal the mark over her eye dealt by
her husband’s brutal fist. She has come to appear against him. There,
as she sits nursing her griefs and wrongs, she unconsciously falls
into that swaying motion peculiar to a woman who is nursing her child
to sleep. Here comes a middle-aged man, whose hairs are already white,
and whose face is seamed with lines. The sorrow and shame that he feels
does not obliterate the expression of stern justice on his face. He has
come to see what can be done for his rascal of a son who is charged with
burglary. He would not have come of his own accord, he would have let
justice take its course, but the cries and moanings of the nearly-crazed
wife and mother, whom he has left at home, has driven him here. He has
come for her poor sake. Here comes a plainly dressed and modest looking
girl, who is sueing for her wages that she earned in the mean kitchen of
some meaner man. The quarter to ten rings out and as Micky Free’s father
would say “now the pop’lace” comes pouring in. They have been feasting
their eyes on the Black Maria, which has just discharged its contents
into the station below. They are white, speckled, saddle-colored and
black. They are well and poorly dressed.


ALL OF THEM ARE UNSAVORY.

Meanwhile a more interesting class of habitues are fast arriving. The
deputy chief walks in with a dignified mien with his docket under his
arm, lays it on his little table, opens it, scrutinizes it, makes an
alteration here and there, and then sits down. A few lawyers come through
a side door in a great hurry, fling their bags down on the table, glance
at the clock, look very much relieved, give the crowd behind the rail
a sharp, shrewd glance which takes them in one and all, even to the
gurgling baby in the arms of that woman with the wet red mouth and the
big moist eye. The reporters come rushing in, glance over the docket, nod
to the lawyers, whisper with a policeman, fling their paper on the table,
borrow somebody’s knife and set about industriously sharpening their
pencils. A couple of sergeants from the other stations arrive and consult
with the deputy-chief. Three or four detectives come in briskly and
confer with them. Then an inspector and some more sergeants and police
come in and, standing erect, look about them with solemn and dignified
air. The deputy critically compares his watch with the clock. A couple of
policemen are immediately on the alert. It is four minutes to ten.

“Bring in the first two prisoners!”

The alert policemen go out and in an incalculably short time bring in
two drunks, who are planted in the dock and told to sit down.

Says the deputy, “Is that John Smith and Reuben Robertson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Which is John Smith?”

“The man on the other side.”

“Very well.”

Then there is an expectant lull. It is


EIGHT SECONDS TO TEN.

As soon as the last second is buried in the grave of time that side
door will open and the Magistrate will come in. The bells in St. James’
steeple go “kling, ling, ling”—there, didn’t I tell you. The side door
swings suddenly open and to sharp cries of “Order! Order!” a tall,
handsome military man with iron gray hair and moustache and dressed
chiefly in a frock coat, the tails of which are flying behind him, darts
into the room and with three long dragoon-like strides is in his seat.
He fires a little battery of nods all round and the deputy steps up to
swear to the informations. Then he whispers with the deputy a moment
and smiles. Then he leans over and whispers with the clerk and laughs
noiselessly, then he clears his throat, surveys the court room with the
eagle glance of a veteran reviewing a troop of hussars, and finally
consults the docket before him. He looks up sharply at the two wretches
standing in the dock and asks which is John Smith. John is terribly
sober, red-eyed, and befrousled.

“John Smith, you are charged with being drunk on ⸺ street on the ⸺ of
May. Were you drunk?”

“Yer ’anner, I was afther going down to ⸺.”

“Were you drunk!”

“⸺goin’ down to McBoasts, pwhin who shud I⸺.”

“Were you drunk!!”

“⸺phwin who shud I meet bud⸺”

“Were you drunk!!!”

“⸺bud ould Mullin’s son, and sez he to me, John, sez he⸺.”

“Were—you—drunk?”

“I was, faith.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that at once?”

“I was tellin’ ye all the time, yer anner, bud⸺”

“Were you ever up before?”

“Och, ax me no kushtions—sure you know right well oi was.”

“Fined $1 and costs or thirty days in jail. Reuben Robertson—is your name
Reuben Robertson?”

“It is, sir.”

“You are charged here with being drunk last night. Is that so?”

“It is not, sir.”

“Who arrested this man?” queries the magistrate.

“I did, sir,” says a policeman promptly. He steps into the witness stand,
lifts his helmet, is sworn, drops his helmet on his head again, and faces
the prisoner.

“Was this man drunk as charged?”

“He was, your Worship. He was so drunk that I had to get a handcart to
bring him to the station in.”

“Do you hear that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you ever here before?”

“No, sir, and if you’ll let me off this time, I’ll leave the city.”

“Discharged!” and Reuben makes a bee-line for the door. The French
adopted the hat at one time as


A TOKEN OF LIBERTY.

They were judges of human nature. The first impulse of a prisoner
discharged in that police court is to clap on his cap. More drunks
follow. The old, old story. One man is charged with being disorderly as
well as drunk.

“He struck me and tore me coat,” says the constable who arrested him.

“Yes,” pipes up the inspector, “and in the station below he was very
obstreperous.”

“Fined $5 and costs or sixty days.”

Then the wife-beater takes his place in the dock. A low-browed,
bull-headed, thick-lipped ruffian with bloodshot eyes. He leans his
arms on the rail and gazes round him with a sulky air. His wife creeps
reluctantly into the witness box—she keeps her face averted; she cannot
trust herself to look at her husband. He pleads not guilty. “She tripped
on the rug and fell against the table, yer Worship.”

“Is this true?”

“It is not, your Worship,” says the poor woman. “He—he struck me with his
fist,” and here she breaks down and sobs hysterically.

“Do you hear what she says?” queries the magistrate.

“She’s lyin to you, sir.”

“I would rather believe her than you,” says the Magistrate, “I fancy a
term in jail—or, say Central prison, would do you good.”

“Oh, don’t send him to jail, sir,” cries the poor woman; “don’t send him
to jail.”

“But he will only beat you again.”

“Yes, I know, sir; but then the children—the children; where could they
get bread and him in the jail, sir?”

It is enough. The man in the dock winces like one who is stabbed. A
thrill runs through the court. The man is discharged.

The youth accused of burglary is led in. He is sullen, defiant, but
uneasy withal. The detectives are not ready to go on with his case, and
he is remanded. The father makes an ineffectual appeal for bail, and then
goes home—home, ah! This furnishes the criminal docket!

An abusive language case comes up. Mrs. Drake is charged by Mrs.
Gosling with the offence. Mrs. Gosling is a sharp-featured lady in an
old-fashioned bonnet and a tired shawl. Mrs. Drake is the woman with the
wet lips, the moist eye and the baby.

“Now,” queries the Magistrate good naturedly, “what is this all about.”

“Your Worship,” says Mrs. Drake, “she called me a dirty scut.”

“Oh, listen till her! listen till her!” shrieks Mrs. Gosling, raising her
hands and eyes, “how can you tell a lie like that and you on your oat?”

“What is a scut,” queries the Magistrate.

“Oh, Your Worship, I wouldn’t shame myself by using such a word.”

“I never called her a scut!” screams Mrs. Gosling, “I never did. She sed
I wasn’t married to me man.”

“Neither ye are.”

“Oh, ye lyin’ hussy, how dar you stand there and—”

“Come, come,” says the Magistrate, and with the aid of the police both
women are quieted down and after much trouble all the witnesses are heard
and Mrs. Gosling is fined $1 and costs. Shortly after eleven, however,
all the cases are disposed of, the crowd disappears, the reporters rush
off to their offices and the room is locked up until the next day at ten.




CHAPTER XIII.

PROMENADING THE STREETS.


This is Yonge street at 10.30 on a Thursday night. I will take up my
stand in the shadow of this corner and watch the crowds roll by. What
a moving mass of young folks, for the overwhelming majority are young
folks. Some of them too young. It is after ten, and yet this bunch of
juveniles moving south are not going home, judging by what I observed
while I was walking, for I have been as far north as Elm street. I
wouldn’t be surprised if those two very immature maidens in the kilted
skirts passed up and down two or three times yet. I have some difficulty
in recognizing them, for there are 100 girls on the street who appear
to have been got up on the same model. There may be slight differences
of dress not discernible by the average male eye, but in essentials this
seems to be a distinctive class. For the most part the other loungers
on the street take it easy—walk slowly and languidly, but this tribe of
whom I speak are in couples, and they walk along with a fine, graceful,
swinging gait that carries them swiftly forward. None of them are out of
their teens. Their dress is not loud. The colors are subdued, and the
style of the Kate Greenaway order. The skirt is short, and enables a
curious on-looker to decide the color and


TEXTURE OF THE HOSE WORN

and the plumpness or attenuation of the young woman’s ankles. They are
certainly youthful, and this short skirt makes them absolutely girlish
in appearance, but in other respects by bold and artistic padding
they attain a robustness, not to say matronliness, which is rather
paradoxical. The swiftness of their walk makes them really the most
noticeable personages on all Yonge street.

Anyone who sees them oscillating regularly between King and Queen streets
would come to the conclusion that they are on “the mash,” but if you
select a couple and keep them in sight for a little while you will find
that they entirely ignore the presence of the men whom they encounter
in their path. These latter, however, do not ignore the girls. They are
frequently greeted as they go along with low-toned remarks, such as
“Hello, girlie!” “Good evening, Birdie!” and with sounds which I have
observed are produced when one person kisses another. To these endearing
salutations they either vouchsafe no notice or else they treat the
intruder to such a reply as causes him to let them pass unnoticed the
next time. This class of our citizenesses seems to me to be a very modern
production, and their habits and usages had cost me some thought.

“Why do they parade up and down the streets?” I said to a long-headed
detective friend, who sometimes gives me pointers and cigars. “They don’t
seem to be


HERE TO MAKE ‘STRIKES,’

and they are not shopping, and if they want to take the air it is neither
necessary to walk so fast nor take to such a crowded street. I suppose
it is none of my business, but, my dear fellow, I believe in the saying
which the Greek dramatist puts into the mouth of one of his characters,
‘I am a man, and whatever concerns men interests me.’ Of course this
concerns girls.” Taking no notice of this brilliant sally, my friend
went on to say: “You think these young women are not intent on making a
strike. Those two we have just passed, and who took no notice of your
wistful gaze, would have returned it with interest if you had been the
proper sort of a party. Those young women, sir, are the best readers of
human nature with whom I am acquainted. They took you in at a glance,
and they said, ‘He wouldn’t stand the biled eysters or the Inja pale
ale.’ I know that pair of business-like females, but I do not know
their exact capacity for bivalves and beer. I am certain though that
it is phenomenal. Now, there goes another miss, some of whose history
is familiar to me. She is pale-faced, with thin, straight nose and
sphynx-like expression. That icy little thing black-mailed a prominent
merchant of this town not long ago, and almost tortured him into his
grave. Detectives were hardly able to scare her off. There is another
who, if she prevailed on you to get into a cab with her, would try to
make you believe that you were a very bad man, and it would require a
portion of your salary, paid periodically, to


ALLAY HER RUFFLED FEELINGS.

“Where do they live?”

“Most of them live with their relatives. Some of them work by fits and
starts. I assure you they are as passionless as marble statues, and yet
they are as fully cognizant of the nature and constitution of man as the
most learned professors of the universities. I believe that the great
majority keep themselves personally free from gross immorality, yet in
their pursuit of what they think to be fun, combined with pieces of
cloth, silk hose, high-heeled boots and bright ribbons, they go as near
the fires of sin as it is possible to go and not get scorched, though I
can assure you that the smoke of evil has so blackened them that they are
morally as bad as those who have fallen, and should be avoided by decent
men and virtuous women.”

“On what then, do they base their claims to man’s gratitude. I mean that
gratitude that expresses itself in presents of gewgaws and finery?”

“It is all built up on hope and fear. I tell you, sir, that these
maidens—there’s Polly B⸺ just gone by; I’ll tell you something about her
presently. These maidens, as I was saying, find their chief game among
the ranks of the old, staid, bald-headed married men. These old fellows
in whom wickedness lives though youth be dead, are flattered by what
they think to be a mash made on one in whom throbs


THE FRESH BLOOD or GIRLHOOD.

It is simply wonderful how easily such men—shrewd old fellows that could
bargain with Shylock on the Rialto—can be hood-winked and hoodooed by a
slip of a girl. But I could tell you of scores of cases where toothless
old men have been led a terrible dance by just such a girl as that Jessie
C., who this moment flitted by us.”

“What is the end of all these goings on?”

“What is the end of it? The end of it is often very close to the
beginning. A few weeks shows our old Romeo that Juliet may be young, but
she is not innocent. In some cases they make an endeavor to stick to
their victim, but as a general thing they soon get everything out of the
old fool, and then laugh at and discard him.”

“But I mean what becomes of the girls?”

“Well, sir, wonderful to say, in a great many instances they don’t go
from bad to worse, but sometimes improve. I know some of them who have
got married. I can’t say that any of them are happily married. In most
cases the husbands must have known all about the “amusements” which
occupied his wife’s attention in girlhood, and are as lacking in decency
as she ever was. Probably he was not only aware of it but shared in the
“gifts” extracted from “his old nobs,” as they affectionately name their
victims. But wonderful as it may seem, some of these unions are blessed
with considerable happiness.”

“You say that many of them amend their ways. What about the others?”

“The others are to be found in the fast houses of Toronto, Hamilton,
Detroit, and Buffalo.”

“Well, don’t you think that even that is a very dreadful state of
affairs? The way you speak one would think that it was a subject of
congratulation that


MORE DID NOT GO TO PERDITION.”

“Perhaps I do speak a little more hopefully than the facts warrant,
but it seems to me so remarkable that any of them should escape going
completely to the bad that it perhaps gives that tone to my remarks.”

“Have you ever formed any idea how such an evil as this might be
lessened?”

“I have thought of it often. My opinion is that parents are largely
responsible for it. There is no use in talking, a mother or father is
very much to blame if they allow their children to be out on the streets
till all hours without knowing what they are doing. I tell you, sir, one
of the most serious signs of the times is the slackening of the authority
of parents. Children now-a-days, except in rare instances, have not that
reverence for their parents which was inculcate when I was a boy.”

“There’s a good deal in what you say, but don’t you think that it is but
the natural reaction from the manner that was formerly adopted by parents
towards their children? Instead of respect and love, parents tried to
inspire their children with fear and awe. There surely is a happy medium.”

“There is; but only a wise and conscientious parent strikes it. I know of
cases where children know almost any other man


BETTER THAN THEIR FATHER.

They see him but seldom, and wouldn’t care if they saw him less. The
mother is perhaps weak minded and characterless, and as a consequence
the children are allowed to drift wherever their inclinations or their
passions direct. Poverty is no reason why a father should neglect the
training of his children. Indeed, the poor man has often more chance
to keep an eye on his offspring than the rich man whose time is taken
up with business and society. So that poverty is no excuse for this
sad neglect. Just to illustrate what I mean: Two weeks ago I saw on
the street a girl dressed very richly. She wore a silk dolman, trimmed
with rich fur. Everything else was to match in costliness and richness.
Four years ago she was a small girl whom I saw every day. She was as
slatternly a little thing as you would see in a day’s walk. But as time
went on there came a change in this and she began to spruce up. The
change was very rapid. Indeed, not only did she show more neatness of
dress, but actually the articles she wore were of a value that would
naturally cause anybody to enquire where did she get them. But natural
as would seem such an enquiry her parents neglected to make it, and
finally she threw off the mask by openly adopting a life of shame. Then
her parents bewailed and moaned at their misfortunes. I was looking after
some ostrich feathers which were stolen, and in the search for them I had
occasion to visit a house of ill-fame on Albert street. In this house S⸺
had taken up her abode. She knew me and knew that I was acquainted with
her whole history. I questioned her and her answers were to the effect
that she was quite satisfied with her life, and thought that it was
infinitely to be preferred to that which she had led as a girl at her
home. She is not naturally bad, but her training had been such as to
make her believe that any way by which good clothes, nice food and some
fun could be obtained with little work, was the way which it was best to
take. She forgot or never comprehended her loathsome, beastly shame, and
compared her slovenly, loveless childhood with her present condition of
rich fare, fine feathers, lovers, race-meetings and theaters, and decided
that the latter was the best. Poor girl—poor wretch, I might say—if she
could only pierce the future and see the end of it all. She’s on the
hill-top of shame now, where the sun is shining, but God help her when
she goes down, as surely she will, amongst the slime and dirt which she
will find at the foot, and in nine cases out of ten it does not take over
three or four years to go from the top to the bottom.”




CHAPTER XIV.

AN ALL-NIGHT MEETING OF THE ARMY.


The crash of tamborines, the jarring roar of a badly strung snare-drum,
and the troubled, fitful echoing of a discordant chorus breaks through
the quiet atmosphere of the darkening street. People turn and look back,
some with a look of perplexity, others with a smile of contempt, while
those going in the direction of the sound quicken their footsteps. As
they pass us we hear them say “the Salvation Army—an all-night meeting,”
and instinctively we turn and follow them. As we draw nearer the people
on the sidewalks thicken, while the music, which in the distance sounded
at first like the wild air of a street minstrel ditty, assumes the style
of a religious chant. The music, if it can so be called, issues from a
dark, dense circular mass of people in the middle of the street. Suddenly
it breaks into nervous and excited motion, and takes up a line of march,
led by a man who walks backwards, facing those who follow, and beating
time with a baton. He leads them in a high pitched, cracked voice, which
at the higher notes becomes positively painful, but is always earnest
and impassioned. It is a motley group that follows him. Prominent among
them are the women, who, regardless of the mud and slush, heedless of the
coarse and impertinent remarks of loafers as they pass, trudge patiently,
singing in a chirpy, squeaky voice, which has been utterly broken and
toggled up by constant and strained use in the chilly, open air. Some of
them are


YOUNG AND PRETTY,

slyly watching the crowds as they pass, while others of them are
middle-aged and hard-featured, the material of which grass widows are
made. Each of them carries a tambourine which they beat out of all
unison, and which, did they but know it, are calculated to do more harm
than good, as their music is enough to drive any man to madness. On they
march, the wild, weird music rising an falling fitfully, while every now
and then the sharp ejaculations of “Praise God!” “Hallelujah!” etc.,
cut through the clangor like nervous shafts of sound. On either side of
the column march a mob of men, women and urchins, some jeering them,
others sympathizing with them, while hundreds tramp along out of sheer
curiosity. The crowd thickens, sways forward anxious to obtain favorable
seats in the hall, as it is now known to all them that there is going
to be a “knee drill and an all night hand to hand fight with the devil
while the gates of hell are to be stormed towards morning by the forlorn
hope.” The long, low barrack-like building is reached, the wide doors
are flung open and the eager mob follow the soldiers with a rush into
the vast and garishly lit interior. Then a scene opens on the eye which
can only be witnessed in a great city. The high amphitheatre at the far
end is soon densely packed by Salvation army soldiers, both men and
women, most of the former dressed in red and blue coats with the breast
illuminated with medals in various designs. The huge barn-like edifice
is filled as if by magic and by all classes of citizens, from the devout
woman sitting patiently in front, who has come to listen and to pray,
down to the brazen-faced night hawk in the jockey cap and bangs, who has
come to see and be seen and to make a mash if she finds a victim. And how
many of such are here! Their cold, calculating, treacherous eyes watching
stealthily the crowds of


SMUG-FACED YOUTHS

that occupy the lower part of the hall. Still the crowd comes pouring in
until the place is packed to the doors, and then for the first time a
partial stillness falls upon the place. There is a slight commotion in
the front row of the elevated stage and then amid a crash of tamborines
and a roar of voices chanting a spirited chorus, a woman with a pale,
spirituelle face and fine, intelligent eyes, shaded by a plain black
straw bonnet bound with red ribbons, steps to the front, stands still as
a statue, and looks with a strangely pitiful expression over the vast
crowd before her. Even after the music ceases, she still stands there,
with fingers tightly clasped and lips moving in silent prayer, and then,
suddenly and unexpectedly, she flings herself down on her knees, her
whole body shaken with spasmodic sobs. The great crowd is thoroughly
stilled now. All eyes are bent upon her, some in alarm, some in pity,
while others burn with the kindling fire of religious fervor. She rises
slowly and, stretching out her trembling hands to the audience, cries in
a clear, bugle-like voice, “Oh, why will you die?” and then overcome by
her feelings, bursts into a torrent of tears again. A thrill runs through
the vast assemblage, all have caught the infection from her, and even the
brazen-faced female in the back seat lets fall her eyes with a guilty
look. Once more the electric woman on the platform begins to speak—at
first brokenly, and gathering strength as she goes on, bursts out in an
appeal to sinners, in which the terrors of a real old-fashioned up and up
fire and brimstone gehenna are painted with a vividness which would


DO CREDIT TO A TALMAGE

or an old-time backwoods hard-shell Baptist preacher. She talks with a
rapidity that is marvellous, every fibre in her willowy body vibrates,
her eyes shine and her thin hands beat the air and rend the countenance
of an imaginary Satan. She continues to speak until completely exhausted,
and when she ceases another mighty chorus fills the hall. One after
another the soldiers get up and relate their experience. Yonder is a man
who used to be a dry-haired and gray-faced drunkard; now he is a man with
new life coursing in his veins and shining in his eyes. He tells what
the Lord has done for him, and as he relates the story his wife, who
will never be beautiful again, for twenty years of unceasing misery have
stamped themselves upon her, falls upon her knees, and, with the fast
tears flowing down her cheeks, cries, “Yes, it’s all true, thank God,
it’s all true!” That girl who is speaking now used to be a night hawk
herself, but no one can mistake her earnestness. And thus the night wears
on amid the crash of discordant music and the wailings and cries of the
converted. The crowd begins to thin towards twelve o’clock, young men and
women meet at the door, exchange a glance and a whispered word, and then
slide out into the darkness. Suddenly there is a tumult in the lower part
of the hall. A cry of “fight!” a savage oath, the audience rise as if by
magic, and two or three muscular soldiers wrench a disorderly visitor to
the door and fling him into the street. The singers sing till they are
hoarse, the talkers talk till their voices crack, the exhorters look wan
and ghastly, the tamborine players fall asleep in their seats, the noisy
place stills frequently, and by four o’clock in the morning the last
of them steps through the entrance and finds his way through the grey
streets towards home.




CHAPTER XV.

THE “SCHOOL.”


Ask any old and experienced officer on the police force, What does more
to corrupt the morals of the young men and young women of this city
than anything else, and he will answer almost certainly, “These dancing
schools.” And if he added that they also did more to undermine the
constitutions of many a “buirdly chiel and bonny lassie” than even the
doctors do, he would also be right. You will hear a young man or woman
talk about “going to school,” but you do not need to be deceived into
thinking that they are taking a course at the public night schools. The
arts taught in the school that they attend, they are already probably
very proficient in.

Some eight or nine years ago these dancing assemblies were very common,
and were attended by nice people, but year by year they have grown worse
until the average “school” of the present day would be shocking and
ruinous to any girl of correct sensibilities.

The “school,” and its congener the hop, or dancing social, is invariably
held in some public hall. A committee is formed by a number of young
men, who stand to make some money if the “school” is a popular one. The
committee should be composed of fighting men, as there is a good deal of
constabulary duty to be done. At most of the schools the fair sex are
admitted free, and quite a number of the blushing damsels who cannot get
a “fellah” take advantage of that rule. When they get into the hall,
however, they run a fair chance of


PICKING UP A CAVALIER

who came to the festivities unattached. On one occasion a spectator who
had made up his mind to pry into the mysteries of a school which met in
an east end hall, near Queen street, was rummaging for his entrance fee
when a buxom young lady came blithely forward and addressed the janitor
in a tone of reproach, “You’re not going to charge the reporder, are ye,”
and the change collector expressed himself to the effect that he never
had any intention of charging such a distinguished personage. Mendacious
youth!—he had his hand extended for the coin and a fixed expression on
his face that meant to get it or die. I did not remember having ever
been introduced to the lady before, but I was very grateful for her
kindness and flattered that I was so widely known. Seeing that I was
known it behooved me to retire to a corner far from those who knew me.
I had not long been there, however, before another man in a shepherd
tartan shirt and minus collar or tie came up and volunteered to give me
any information concerning the ladies and gentlemen on the floor which
I desired. Without being bid he went off into graphic biographical
dissertations on these, but as they were of an exceedingly scandalous
nature I would not promise him that they would be published. One lady,
whom he designated Big Mouth Moll, and who must have rivalled Messalina
in the variety of her amours if this young man were to be believed, he
was especially severe upon.

“Will you put that in, reporter?” he said.

I explained that Miss B. M. Moll was undoubtedly a lady, and that
it might wound her feelings to publish facts concerning her “little
accidents.” He went away very much disgusted with me.

A more intelligent “scholar” whom I met confirmed a good deal of my
collarless friend’s unfavorable account of


THE GENERAL MORAL TONE

of the assembly. He said he knew them all, and that they nearly all
worked in different industrial establishments in the city, and that
pleasure rather than lucre ruled their lives.

One young woman was calculated to attract attention in particular. Her
face was colorless, with the exception of a slight flush that seemed to
flicker over her sunken cheek. She was languid, and after each quick
movement of the dance a quick little gasp escaped out of the faded
rose of her lips. Everything betokened a life being extinguished by
consumption’s chill embrace. She was an object for tender solicitude, but
the burly curly-headed young ruffian who dragged her through the dance
seemed not to be aware that a grisly guest was following at his heels to
claim his partner for another scene than this.

I gathered from a remark made by one of the ladies that something had
been going on of which I had not been cognizant. She whispered that
“O’Brien was as drunk as Billy Bedam,” and investigation showed that
quite a number, while not as drunk as the historical Mr. Bedam was in the
habit of getting, were pretty well on. Having therefore seen enough to
disgust me I left.

This perhaps is an unusually low type of the “school,” but the best is
only a degree or two higher.

Most of the persons present were boys and girls born and reared in this
Canada of ours. I am confident from what I have observed that these young
women will become the wives of these or similar young men, and it is
pitiable and humiliating to think that another generation of Canadians
will grow up under the tutelage of such parents. Free schools are a
failure if they cannot teach a man that squirting tobacco juice over your
dancing partner’s shoulder is bad manners.

And yet parents permit their daughters to go to such places, and be
dragged down to the level of the lowest, not only in actions and
conversation, but in the habits of thought which such associations create.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE GENUS TRAMP.


“One half the world knows not how the other half lives,” and for the
matter of that doesn’t care. The “one half,” by which in all probability
is meant the well-to-do portion of the community, neither know nor
care how their impoverished “brothers and sisters” (dearly beloved of
course) live, nor for the matter of that how they die. Reader, gentle,
fair or otherwise, were you ever the unhappy possessor of that rather
unnecessary article known as the “key of the street?” Have you been out
visiting until the “wee sma’ hours,” and on returning to your lodgings
found that you had left your latch-key at home, also your cash, and
the dread of your irate landlady, to whom you probably are in arrears,
prevents you from rousing the house up? You have no intimate friend to
quarter yourself on, not sufficient money to pay for bed and breakfast
at a first-class hotel (the only ones accessible at that hour)? If so,
then you must per force make use of your key of the street, or, in other
words, tramp the city the remainder of the night, or rather morning,
until long after “Faint Aurora dawns.”

If, gentle reader, you have gone through this, to you, trying ordeal,
you will readily comprehend some of the situations that I will try to
describe in this paper. If not, I will endeavor to enlighten you as to
the ways and means used in struggling or rather shambling through the
world by those enfants trouves, known to the benevolent as, “homeless
poor.”

I speak of their ways and means rather than manners and customs,
which may be described as the midshipman wrote down in his journal,
the “Manners and customs” of the Fiji Islanders: “Manners—None.
Customs—Nasty.”

How many of the 100,000 and odd (and some of them are very odd) people
of Toronto, who in their daily walks abroad, come across at intervals
numbers of squalid, unkempt, ragged, and


RUM-BLOSSOMED BEINGS,

ever give a thought as to how these miserables live. Where did they come
from? Where are they going to? How do they get their food, and above
all, where do they rest at night? Such questions as these never bother
the brains of the gay gentlemen and ladies fair who when out for a walk
meet these bedraggled wights. They see them and turn away in disgust.
Even the ladies bountiful who (to their honor be it said) have their own
pet charitable institutions, know them not; they also, like the priest
and the Levite, pass them by. These objects that you meet, ladies and
gentlemen, are mostly professional tramps, and a most uncanny tribe
they are. A great many of them have seen better days, but misfortune,
disappointments, blighted hopes, and above all an overwhelming craving
for alcoholic stimulants, fostered in their palmy days, perhaps by
champagne, Hockhiemer, and Moselle, but now only satisfied by the
soul-corroding whiskey which they love, has brought them down to
their present condition. Many of them, however, are born vagabonds,
who have been “constitutionally tired” since their infancy. Some of
them have trades, which they are too lazy to work at, even if their
whisky-shattered nerves would allow them; but they are too far gone now
to attempt anything in the shape of industry. Besides, what mechanic or
tradesman would hire them? They are in rags and filthy, and an unholy and
pungent atmosphere, suggestive of an ancient distillery, pervades their
surroundings. These aromatic gentry, as I before stated, are tramps,
proper, pure, and simple. The nomadic harbingers and epitomes of all that
is squalid, wretched, and poverty-stricken in the land. Hopeless, hungry,
and miserable, they tramp on their weary way, friendless, forgotten, and
unknown until, upon the mattrass of some jail hospital, or out in the
fields beneath the stars, they breathe their last and take their final
tramp.

I have given you a picture of the ordinary tramp, who overruns the
continent from Collingwood to Galveston, from Portland to San Francisco,
and is merely an ill-omened bird of passage, as in contradistinction to
our


LOCAL VAGABONDISTI,

who remain year in and year out in our midst; and it is of these
miserables who have made Toronto their field of action, or rather
inaction, that I wish particularly to speak. Go down, let us say, to the
Market square, any day during the winter, or in the months of navigation
to the Esplanade. Hovering around the doors of the omnipresent “saloon”
they lounge, a motley crowd. Occasionally, if the weather is not too
rainy or cold, they may be seen posing on the lee side of a corner house,
smoking clay pipes of unknown age, or chewing black strap in meditative
mood. But the grog shop is always their objective point, and they seldom
go far from its beery borders. Occasionally they invest the barroom to
thaw themselves out in cold weather, and with a faint hope that someone
will “set ’em up,” but they seldom stay long, for they know they are not
wanted by the proprietor, who hesitates not to make them aware of the
fact, and the seeker after spiritual comfort, after taking a long last,
lingering look at the array of bottles, secures his overcoat upon him
with its solitary button, and goes forth again into the cheerless streets.

These unfortunates eke out a miserable existence in the winter time by
transferring dark diamonds from the carts to the household coal bins,
shoveling snow and doing odd jobs of all sorts, by which they manage to
get hold of a quarter or so, and on receipt of the same betake themselves
to a grog shop, taking care to choose one where a layout of pulpy and
scoriac liver, yellow ochre-like mustard, and stale bread form the menu
of the free lunch. How on earth they manage to exist at all during the
long winter would be a deep and perplexing mystery, were it not from the
knowledge of the fact that there is such a place as “Castle Green” on
the banks of the Don, where a great many of them pass the happy hours
away under sentences from “the colonel.” In fact, too many of them. The
jail is simply a harbor of refuge, to which they, by getting drunk or
disorderly, can easily find their way, for notwithstanding the fact that
these poor wretches have little comfort or enjoyment to look forward to
in their hard journey of life, they prefer the cell and jail corridor,
“skilly” and bread and water, and loss of liberty as well, to being
half starved and in danger of freezing to death to the dignity of a few
citizen.

Summer is the most propitious season for the bummer. When spring comes in
earnest and navigation commences he changes venue from the inhospitable
market square and its surroundings, and seeks the busy Esplanade with
its outlying wharves where he, although not belonging to any organized
stevedores gang, picks up a good many jobs in helping to load and unload
vessels of all kinds, when he may be said to revel in comparative
wealth, though his outward man is, as to dress, unchanged, for he, like
many other philosophers, treats with scorn the vanity of dress.




CHAPTER XVII.

A VAG BY CHOICE.


A good many of these unappointed attaches of the stevedores have once
been sailors and still have a hankering for the water side. A few days
ago I met a good specimen of this class, who, although dressed in a
dilapidated suit of “hodden gray,” had the unmistakeable look of the
sailor about him which needed not the “foul anchor” tattooed on the back
of his right hand, nor the mermaid and other devices on his arms to
confirm. I managed after a time to get into conversation with him, but
the man seemed reticent, not to say surly. When I asked him if he had
ever been to sea he replied, “Go to blazes and find out.” I then told him
that I meant no impertinence or harm by the question. I told him that I
had a son now at sea, and consequently I took an interest in everything
in the maritime line. To keep up the unities I took a plug of tobacco
with which I had supplied myself with a view to just such an emergency,
and offered the ancient mariner a chew, which he accepted and began to
look a little more pleasant, and showed some signs of loquacity. I then
proposed that we should go and have a glass of grog, a proposition which
appeared to strike him as being correct. So we went to a water-side
tavern sitting room where we each took what seamen call a throat season.
I then suggested that we should have a smoke, to which the ex-mariner
agreed, and another “throat season,” which proposal also met his views.
By this time my quondam friend began to wax merry, and went so far as
to volunteer to sing a favorite song of his entitled “The Cumberland’s
Crew,” a lyric based on the sinking of the United States war ship
Cumberland by the improvised Confederate ironclad Merrimac at Hampton
Roads during the Yankee “rebellion.” I told him that, glad as I would
be to listen to the heroic verse, yet it being rather early in the day
to burst into song, I would much prefer to hear him tell me some of his
doubtless many adventures that he had met with at sea. My ancient mariner
at this stage of the seance began to get lachrymose, even unto the verge
of tears.

“I don’t like to speak or think of my past life,” said he, “but if I tell
you anything I may as well tell you all.”

“Do so,” said I. “I know it will be interesting,” so I ordered some more
grog and sat down again comfortably to listen to the story of the sailor
tramp.

My partner drank his grog, laid down his pipe, took a huge chew of
tobacco, and commenced his yarn. “I am neither a sailor or a sojer now. I
am


NOTHING BUT A TRAMP,

although, by rights, I ought to be a gentleman. You needn’t smile. I only
said I ought to be one, but I am not. Yes, my father was a clergyman in
the west of England. I won’t exactly say where. However, he was rector
of the parish, and I was his eldest son, and consequently the hope of
his house. I had a younger brother who, I suppose, is at home doing
well, at least he was when I last heard from him, but that’s a good many
years ago. Well, I may safely say that in all the west, east, north, or
south of England, or, for the matter of that, any other country, there
never grew up a more mischievous or incorrigible boy than I was. From
the time I was first put in trousers until I got the bounce for good
from my reverend father, I did nothing that I could help but rob birds’
nests, upset bee-hives, and abet poachers and other bad characters in
the neighborhood. I ran away and stayed with a gang of gipsies for six
months, and the vagabond proclivities of my nature were remarkably well
developed, as you can readily understand, in their company. A slight
flirtation with a young woman, the particulars of which I need not
mention, occasioned my hasty departure from the tribe, and I returned
home a prodigal son indeed. I was then sent to Eton, where I attained a
smattering of classics and mathematics, but as I unfortunately took the
liberty of putting a quantity of cobbler’s wax in one of the tutor’s
boots, and was convicted of divers other peccadilloes of like nature, I
got my conge from my alma mater, and returned home again. My father, good
man, got out of all patience with me, for my language was occasionally
of the vilest, and I swore like our army in Flanders at the servants on
all possible occasions. I was given a £50 note with a request that I
would go forth and seek my fortune, which I did in London, but didn’t
find it. I spent all my money, and as a last resource shipped as boy on a
drogher bound to Newcastle for coals. I was just turned sixteen then, and
bitterly did I curse the day I tried the sea for a living. I was ropes
ended by the skipper, thrashed by the mate, and kicked and cuffed by all
the crew. This didn’t suit me at all, so I stole the boat one night when
I was on anchor watch, and sculled myself ashore, letting the boat go
adrift when I landed, and tramped my way to Liverpool. I shipped as boy
again on a Packet ship for New York, and on the passage I got it lively
from all hands, they leading me the life of a dog. Well, we were all
discharged in New York, and I shipped again, this time for Marseilles as
ordinary seaman.


THE CAPTAIN WAS A TYRANT,

and the mates were even worse. All hands were pelted with belaying pins,
and besides we were half starved. There happened to be a “tender” for
a British man-of-war drumming up recruits for the English navy in the
harbor, so I and two others put our shirts in the fire rigging (a sign
that the officers of the tender well knew.) They sent an armed boat
aboard, and I, together with about a dozen others, said we were British
seamen, and volunteered to fight for the “widow,” as the sailors call
the Queen. We left in the tender for Malta, and were enrolled among the
crew of the line-of-battle ship Brunswick, where we were put through our
facings I can tell you. We commenced by giving cheek, but they soon took
the nonsense out of us with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Well, to make a long
story as short as possible. I was drafted into a corvette going home to
Liverpool. I deserted on the first opportunity, and shipped again for
New York. This was during the rebellion. I then joined the Yankee navy
and arose to the high position of captain of the foretop on the United
States frigate Essex. At Baton Rouge I was struck by a piece of shell in
the leg, and sent to hospital, where I remained until the war was over,
when I was mustered out of the service. I had a right to a grant of land
from the government, but I sold it to a broker and spent the money for
whisky. Since that time I’ve been knocking around through the States on
the tramp. I can’t ship before the mast, for my leg is so stiff that I am
unable to go aloft. The only comfortable time I have is when I can manage
to get into some hospital, where I get plenty of nourishment and a good
bed to sleep in. However, here I am now, but where I’ll be to-morrow the
Lord only knows.”

“Do you ever think of going home?” asked the scribe.

“Home! Well, I should think not. They, of course, think me dead long ago,
and I don’t want to disgrace them, anyway. My old father used to say, ‘As
ye make your bed, so shall ye lie,’ or something like that. I’ve found
it so, and must take the consequence.” “Oh, I tell you,” added the jolly
tar, “there are thousands like me knocking around at sea.”

“Take another bowl?” asked I.

“Don’t care if I do,” said the sailor. “There’s no use being poor when a
half a pint of


WHISKY MAKES YOU RICH.”

“Well, see here, old fellow,” said I, “I don’t wish to be impertinent,
but don’t you think grog has been at the bottom of all your troubles?”

“No I don’t,” was his reply. “I never was much of a swizzer until lately.
It’s my own inherent vagabond nature that has made me the tramp I am.
Whisky has been the ruin of many a good man, but I don’t blame it in my
case.”

“Well, good-bye old fellow,” said I; “I hope you’ll strike luck some of
these days.”

“Good-bye,” said the ancient mariner, and as I departed I heard him order
another glass of the ardent to be drank au solitaire.

Here is one tramp, I mused, who appears candid enough, in all conscience,
and who, strange to say, does not charge his decline and fall to the
demon, drink. I could not help feeling a pity for this unfortunate,
who, born in comfort and luxury, brought up at home and given every
chance to get on in the world and lead a respectable life, had thrown
himself away and become a miserable waif and wanderer. Mais chacun à
son goût—Everybody to his taste. Some people have honors thrust upon
them, but here is a fellow who deliberately heaps dishonor on his own
unfortunate head. How many young men in the city of Toronto are, after
a fashion, like this poor sailor? I know not their number, but I see
samples of them every day.

    Thus musing I strayed along the Esplanade,
      While I chewed the end of a sweet and bitter fancy,
    Until brought up all standing by the voice loud and commanding
      Of a drunken seamen in a woolen “gansy.”

I was about to tackle the seamen in the guernsey, or “gansy,” as he would
call it, with a view of learning something of his history, but as he, in
answer to my polite enquiry as to the state of his health, told me to go
to Halifax—or somewhere—and not liking his hostile looks, I concluded
that I had enough of “Sailor town” for that day, and took a lateral
traverse in the direction of the St. Lawrence market.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE SLUM-DWELLER.


It cannot be said of Toronto, as it can be of some other cities, that
whole districts are in such a condition as to be aptly designated slums.
Portions of streets are inhabited by people whose manner of living is
so degraded, and whose homes are so comfortless and filthy, as to merit
such a term, but this cannot be said of any one whole district or street.
Even Lombard street, which has rather an unenviable notoriety, has homes
in it where the peace and satisfaction which crown industry and sobriety
are to be found. St. John’s ward, which is often alluded to slightingly,
contains within its borders some of the handsomest streets in the city.
Our merchant princes dwell there. Hundreds of mechanics make their happy
homes in the Noble Ward. The slum portion is very small compared with the
acres and acres where the domestic virtues go hand in hand with industry
and plenty. Our city is of such a composite character that next door
neighbors are often as far apart in their manner of living as is the
east from the west. Strangers who read about the doings of the denizens
of York street two years ago were surprised to find on visiting the city
that there were many bright, busy stores, two fine hotels and plenty of
respectable houses on the street. Any remarks in the following interviews
regarding localities will therefore be understood to mean only certain
portions of those localities.


INTERVIEWS WITH CLERGYMEN.

For the purpose of getting the views of a class of gentlemen whose
profession brings them frequently in contact with the vicious classes of
our city, NEWS reporters waited on several clergymen. Those selected were
men who were known not to be shirkers from this unpleasant portion of a
pastor’s duties. The result will be found below.


A CITY MISSIONARY’S EXPERIENCES.

An evangelist and city missionary of some years experience in Toronto
was interviewed. “You cannot,” he said “tell what the Toronto slums are
like, seeing them by day light. You enter a tenement house on Duchess
or Lombard streets in the forenoon or at noon. All looks quiet enough.
The women, generally of middle age, are standing at the door exchanging
gossip with their neighbors. Some appearance of household work has
been going on, and as noon approaches there is an odor of onion stew
or fried pork. We enter. You are always safe in these regions when
accompanied by a policeman or a reporter or a city missionary, but
your visit would be much more favorably received if your escort be of
either of the two latter classes. The furniture of the living room is of
the cheapest and simplest description of second-hand ware, the tables
are battered and sodden with the smear of innumerable drinking bouts.
The chairs are evidently more often used as missiles propelled through
the air by hostile hands than for the peaceful purpose of resting the
human body. The crazy old windows are grimy with dirt; grimy are the
floors, the ceilings, the ricketty stairways leading to unknown dens
above. Almost all of these tenement houses are a perfect baby-burrow of
children, untaught, unwashed, unkempt, enfants perdus of the gutter,
the protoplasm out of which the great Sin and the yet greater Misery
of our city is certain to shape itself in the future! Presently,
three or four able-bodied young men come in from what they call work.
A sinister-looking young woman in frowsy dress, the cut across her
whisky-sodden face telling its tale of last night’s revel, joins the
group. The eldest child is sent with a cracked jug for beer to the corner
saloon. As a rule, these people fare considerably better than the poorer
ones among the respectable sober working people; they live from hand to
mouth; the only text in the gospel which they obey implicitly being “Let
the morrow take thought for itself.” When they are not starving they are
generally well supplied with bread, meat, tea and vegetables; nor are
such luxuries as pies and cake unknown to them, to say nothing of malt or
spirituous liquor, though, as a rule, the drinking sets in most heavily
at night. At about 10 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to see one of these
establishments at full blast! Then


DRINK REIGNS UNCONTROLLED.

Of other immorality there is comparatively little; the scorching breath
of the rum king will tolerate no rival! Money has been procured, if in no
other way by pawning dress or tools to the people of the house, for every
one of these tenement dens is, as a rule, an unlicensed groggery and
pawnbroker’s shop! The debauch which ensues nearly always ends in a free
fight, in which the most furious combatants are often the women.”

“Have you ever recognized in the night life of the city slums any man or
woman you have known in better circumstances in this city?”

“Yes unquestionably, and in more cases than people would think who
do not look below the surface for the three sorriest sins that enter
hell, drunkenness, laziness and dishonesty, have the same effect on the
educated and the uneducated. Take a recent case. Early last month I was
called on to visit, not for the first time, a young married woman whom I
had known in days when she had every right to the title of lady. I found
her occupying a room on the rear ground floor of a house on Teraulay
street. Her only baby, fortunately for herself and for it, lay dead. The
father had more than once thrown it at the mother in a fit of drunken
passion. I gave her money enough to provide decently for the funeral and
promised to return two days afterwards, in order to conduct some simple
sort of funeral ceremony.

“When I first knew this woman, then a girl years ago, her father was
still living a prosperous hotel-keeper on Yonge street, a prominent
church member, and an affectionate father who spared no pains on his
daughter’s education. Aggie grew up to be a bright engaging girl, with
a charming figure, expressive hazel eyes, and long curling dark brown
hair that reached to her waist. She was especially clever at ciphering,
and acted for some time as book-keeper for a well known Toronto firm.
She became an accomplished pianist, and sang for some years in one of
our best church choirs. Her next misfortune after her birth in this
evil world eighteen years before was her father’s death. Her mother was
left in fairly good circumstances, and the owner of a respectable house
on George street. She was a good-natured but weak minded woman, the
instincts of hotel-life were strong upon her, and as a matter of course,
she took to keeping boarders. She kept a good house, and good table, for
little Aggie was smart and looked after all that, and there were gay
times when


AGGIE WOULD SING

and play for the young gentlemen in the evenings! But one set after
another of young men came and went, and Aggie was unmarried at
twenty-six, for bless you Sir, you know boarding-house flirts, as a
rule, don’t marry. Meanwhile drinking habits had grown on the mother, an
inferior class of boarders came to the house. In an evil hour for herself
Aggie became engaged to marry a handsome well-bred and well educated
cadet of a rich Lancashire family, cotton manufacturers, whose trade
brand is known through the world. Horace B⸺ had been at Oxford for a few
terms. A subaltern in a militia regiment which he had to leave, a clerk
in the Civil Service, finally he was shipped off to Canada. He married
Aggie and was a shiftless, reckless, drunken husband! Through him Aggie
became addicted to drink, and her mother lost house and home. After many
migrations they sought refuge in the Teraulay street tenement, where
I found the dead baby. Two days later I renewed my visit. All trace of
Aggie and her husband was lost, on a pine table the sole article of
furniture in the room, lay the dead baby, purple with decomposition
partly covered by a scanty rag! I learned from the people of the next
house that a drinking debauch had taken place, the participants in which
after hurling the furniture at each others’ heads, threw the baby out
of the rear window into the yard! I at once procured decent christian
sepulture for this child of sin and misery.


IDLENESS AND DRINK.

The Rev. William H. Laird, pastor of Elm street Methodist church,
stated that but a small part of his congregation, so small as to be
inappreciable, came from the poorest part of St. John’s ward, on whose
northern verge this church is situated. Still he had visited among this
very class a good deal, being led to do so by having particular cases
brought under his notice by a young people’s association in connection
with his church, who had undertaken this duty. He was very frequently
appealed to for monetary aid and to visit the sick and distressed. When
asked if he had seen many cases in which reform had been effected through
the influence of religious agencies, Mr. Laird said: “Yes, but only in
isolated cases.” He considered that the two great causes of pauperism
were shiftless idleness and drink. The cases in which pauperism was the
result of inevitable misfortune were, in his opinion, very few. The
tramp, the beggar, the slum-dweller, owed his unhappy condition to one,
generally to both, of the above causes.


RELEASED CONVICTS.

Among other clergyman of this city the writer was able to obtain the
opinion of one who had been for some time acting chaplain of the
Provincial penitentiary at Kingston. In reply to my question, “Have you
seen anything of the Toronto ex-members of your convict congregation
since your residence in Toronto?” this gentleman made the following
statement: “I am glad to tell you that to my certain knowledge there
are now living in Toronto no small number of reformed criminals whom I
have known in the Provincial penitentiary during my term of office as
chaplain. One of them is a tradesman in a small way living in St. John’s
ward. He has married happily, and is the father of several children. He
is a most steady, sober, industrious man. I think great influence for
good was exerted over this man by the introduction of church music into
the penitentiary chapel, which, previously to my term of office, was
not permitted by the authorities. The man referred to had a good voice,
and was much interested in our singing classes, and since his release
he has been a steady attendant at a Toronto church, of whose choir he
is a valued member. Another one is that of a Scotch young lady, who had
been decoyed to Canada by a faithless lover, and, as too often happens
to girls not naturally vicious, had found her only refuge in a “fast
house,” having quarreled with the mistress of which, she was accused
of larceny and sent for a short term to Kingston. Since her release
benevolent ladies in Toronto received her and provided for her return
home. She is the daughter of a missionary on the west coast of Africa, I
also knew of several young men in quite respectable positions who have
accomplished the difficult task of retrieving character and habits, even
after touching the lowest depths of a convict prison. Certain forms of
crime seem to me to be acute, like the most dangerous fevers which may
kill, but recovered from do not recur. It is the smaller chronic types of
crime, lying, thieving, drinking, which once contracted, hardly ever are
eradicated.

“Do you ever recognize members of your former convict congregation who
have not reformed?”

“But too frequently. Under the glare of Toronto lamps I see but too many
faces once familiar to me in that unhappy flock of black sheep. I have
recognized them among the loafers at the street corners, among


THE INCORRIGIBLES

half-thief and wholly drunkard, whom I have met when summoned to visit
some case of illness or destitution in the city slums, I have seen the
faces of women far more imbruted than when I had known them as convicts,
and these not amongst the ranks of fallen women, strange to say, but
chiefly as wives or housekeepers in rooms or tenement dwellings, in
Duchess street or St. John’s ward.

Once, shortly after I had ceased to act as chaplain at Kingston, I had
left behind me still a convict, but under a promise of release for her
good conduct, a Toronto girl named Annie ⸺. Annie had been for some years
a nurse in the prison hospital. She was singularly neat, good-humored,
and devoted to her duties, and I was glad to hear she had been released.
One evening in the July of that year, returning home with my wife to our
house on G⸺ avenue, what was my astonishment to see what appeared to be a
bundle of rags huddled together on the porch by the door. With the dress
of a scarecrow, with every appearance of exposure to wind and weather,
with unkempt hair and all the appearance of a human wild beast, was the
once comely and gentle Annie. We gave her a trifle to get a bed, and told
her to come again next morning for breakfast and help, but she wandered
away in the night and we saw her no more. There are many such women and
men in this city who are never so happy as when in prison; the prison is
to such a monastery, with its three-fold rule of poverty, obedience and
temperance.

Of the criminal class in Toronto there are two grades; the first of these
consists of those who commit the great crimes, such as murder, forgery
and the like; such crimes result in many cases from motives which may
occur but once in a lifetime; such cases of reform as I have seen have
come mainly from these classes. But the crimes which depend on lying,
dishonest, laziness, and unchastity are ineradicable, humanly speaking.
The intenser forms of crime are like the deadliest diseases which attack
but once in a lifetime; the other class of crime clings to the character
like itch or leprosy.

Among the more famous Toronto criminals under my care was the famous


GRACE MARKS, THE GIRL MURDERESS.

She was a singularly beautiful girl, fourteen, with dark eyes, graceful
figure, and a transparent olive complexion, when she and her paramour
committed the crime, for which he was hanged. Grace had pleasing manners
and though considerably past forty when under my care, still retained the
remains of her girlish beauty. She told me that for many years she never
slept without seeing the face of the murdered man in her dreams. She
has been for some years a free woman, and is now a respectably settled
married woman in an American city. There is one class of women who trade
in human life, who are but too seldom brought within the grasp of the
law, and when the guilt of murder is most clearly proven, are too often
allowed to escape with comparative impunity. Perhaps the worst case of
this class known in Toronto was that of the wife of an American quack
doctor, to whom, and to her husband, was clearly brought home the death,
by malpractice in their den, of a young girl, daughter of a minister of
the gospel. I saw this woman-fiend in the workroom at penitentiary, pert,
cheerful, and confident of the speedy relief she afterwards obtained.


FROM THE EAST END.

The Rev. Mr. Taylor, rector of St. Bartholemew’s church, at the east end
of Wilton avenue gave much interesting information with regard to the
condition of the poorer classes at the east end of the city. “With us,”
he said, “there is more poverty than pauperism. What pauperism there is,
unlike that screened from public view by the alleys of St. John’s ward,
can be seen from the public thoroughfares. The lowest district, Regent
street, can be seen from Wilton avenue. It is wide and well-drained, but
the humble hovels which line its sides make a hideous comment on its
ambitious title. Little better than this is St. David’s street, which
crosses Regent street, east and west. Sumach street was poverty-stricken
a few years ago, but is now improving, but Sackville, Sydenham,
Parliament, and all the streets in this region are to a great degree
peopled by the poorer classes of our citizens.” As far as many years
intimate acquaintance with the poor of this district has entitled him
to form an opinion, there is little or no public immorality among those
people, who thus form an entirely different class from the inhabitants
of the St. John’s ward slums. The great evil is a certain shiftlessness,
a tendency to hope for support anywhere or from any one rather than to
their own exertions. This I have noticed especially among immigrants from
London and other parts of England. Mr. A. called on me several years ago
with an introduction from one of the best known and most hardworking
clergymen in a well-known London parish. He was respectably dressed, and
though he lived in one of the poorest shanties in a lane off Sackville
street, the place when I called there was clean, even neat, and decorated
with a few good engravings and other survivals of his former English
home. He had a wife, a neat, well-dressed person, three fine girls,
and two as nice boys as I have ever seen. The girls had already found
employment as dressmakers, a business to which they had been apprenticed
at Camberwell, London. The father sought a genteel situation, something
in the line of a clerk, bookkeeper or secretary; he could write a good
hand, and was a competent arithmetician. But as you know, our city is
already overstocked with applicants for such positions. I soon found
that Mr. A. looked to the church for some slight monetary assistance,
which, as our poor fund, small enough for legitimate uses, was already
over-drained, I was obliged to withhold. The result was that Mr. A.


KEPT AWAY FROM CHURCH

for about a year. But the evil righted itself, as the boys grew up
and found employment. They and their sisters supported the family by
their earnings, an act of self-denial which, I have no doubt, was of
the greatest possible moral benefit to themselves. After a time Mr. A.
found occupation not wholly incompatible with his dignity, as caretaker
in a furniture factory, became a most regular attendant at church and
a communicant. This is the history of many of these English arrivals
in Toronto, more especially of those who come from London. They are
generally fairly well-educated, are respectably connected, and in most
cases, I believe, are “assisted” to this country by relations anxious
to shift from their shoulders the burdens of directing or aiding their
course. The parents are people trained to earn money, if at all, in a
single groove, seldom in one available in Canada. They cannot, like
our people, turn their hand to anything that presents itself. But for
all that they form a valuable element in our city population, for
their children soon get Canadianized, imbibe the Canadian idea of
being self-dependent and form the best possible addition to our vastly
increasing numbers. One of the greatest evils I have to contend against
in dealing with this class is an absurd and bastard pride and love of
keeping up appearances. A woman living in a rented room on Sackville
street lost a child by death. I provided her out of the poor fund with a
plain black coffin as the means of conveyance to the place of interment.
Soon afterwards another woman lodging in the same house lost a child. I
offered to do the same for her that I had done in the former case. The
woman indignantly refused, but begged me to give her money to get a more
expensive coffin. Now, I had in my pocket a small sum of money from the
poor fund, which I had intended to give her, but which I felt compelled
to withhold when I found it would but be spent superfluously on “the
trappings and the suits of woe.” Still I felt sorry for the poor mother,
in her desire to give a handsome funeral to her dead darling, though
I could not conscientiously gratify her at the expense of those of my
poor who needed food, not sentimental gratification. But when I came to
officiate at the funeral I found she had provided a rosewood casket with
white metal plate, a hearse and a carriage. Among my saddest experiences
here are my visits to


THE NUMEROUS BABY FARMS,

which drive a more or less thriving trade in this part of the city. Some
of them are situate on St. David street, several of them in a healthier
position north of the General hospital. I have frequently visited these
places; each dwelling will accommodate from three or four to as many
as eight or ten infants, who are in almost all cases the children of
shame, for whom their mothers, often persons in respectable positions,
pay a small sum monthly. I do not think that they are neglected by the
women who undertake the charge of them; in fact it is, of course, their
interest that the babies should thrive, as on their living depends the
monthly pay; but the circumstances of the birth and rearing of these poor
infants, and, above all, the deprivation of the mother’s milk, the often
sour milk in the feeding-bottle, and the unavoidable crowding together,
make these places nothing less than nurseries of death—the babies all
die!”




CHAPTER XIX.

IN THE WARD.


My next interview was with the rector of a church west of Yonge street,
the congregation of which, although attended by many of the elite in
Toronto uppertendom, mainly consists of the lower middle class, and of
the respectable inhabitants of the St. John’s ward streets. In this
church, as in a few others in the city, it may be said in the words of
the oldest poetry, “The rich and the poor meet together, for the Lord is
the maker of them all.”

This clergyman does not wish his name published, but states his readiness
to do so in a letter to THE NEWS should any doubt be expressed as to the
accuracy of the facts reported.

The portion of Toronto from whence his congregation is drawn covers the
poorest and least reputable part of St. John’s ward—Teraulay, Elizabeth,
and University streets, with the stretch of lanes and alleys between
them, east and west; but north and south from these lanes extend smaller
lanes, or rather rearages between the houses in the front streets,
and occupying the place of the closets and woodsheds. In this network
of slums comes and goes a fluctuating population of pauperism, the
enfants perdus of the city, all those broken down by vice or poverty or
misfortune.

One morning at the early hour of three this clergyman was awakened by a
hard knock at his door. He put his head out of the first window and asked
what was the matter. A man on the door-step said that his wife was dying,
would Mr. ⸺ visit her? The clergyman hurriedly dressed, and accompanied
his guide, who was far-gone in liquor, to a yard in the rear of one of
the bye lanes alluded to above. As they entered the yard a number of
small curs about the various premises began to bark, on which Mr. ⸺
beheld to his astonishment, several old wooden boxes gradually raised up,
from each of which, like the head of a turtle from its shell, protruded
the head of a boy who had chosen this strange sleeping-place, the bare
ground for his mattress,


AN OLD BOX FOR HIS BED-CLOTHES!

Satisfied that no danger was to be feared, the unkempt little heads were
withdrawn under their boxes.

They entered a room, full of men and women, on a table in which, covered
with a scanty rag, was laid the corpse of the woman, who, the clergyman
soon ascertained, had been dead for three hours. The husband, he shrewdly
suspected, had asked for this visit in order to obtain drink-money,
under pretence of assistance towards funeral expenses. The occupants
of the room, male and female, were, most of them, more or less drunk;
they belonged to the lowest type of Irish hoodlum; in the center of the
room near the table on which lay the corpse, sat up a skinny old hag,
repulsive and horrible in her mirth. Mr. A⸺ was soon pressed for a small
immediate sum of money, “jist to make things dacent.” But my friend Mr. ⸺
is possessed, not only of great shrewdness and resolution, but has also
the physical strength so necessary in visiting such dens. He refused
their request for money, but said he would come next day and help. This
kind announcement was by no means received with enthusiasm. The old crone
in the bed exclaimed “musha, lave the gintleman alone; sure to-morrow
we’ll sind to the ladies at the convint, and it’s they will do the dacent
thing for us!” This appeal to the odium theologicum was judged to be
ill-timed by the others, one of whom gave the old lady a dig in the ribs
which sent her flying from the bed to the floor.

Next day he purchased a plain but neatly got up coffin at a cost of six
dollars, with a shroud to match, and sent it to the house of mourning.
But when this warm-hearted clergyman later in the day met the bereaved
husband the latter broke out with “Arrah, tare ’an ages! did yer
riverence think me woife’ud be buried in a thing like that, and she a
rale lady born? Sure it ’ud disgrace the honor of the family!” On being
thus rebuffed, Mr. ⸺ told the man


TO RETURN THE COFFIN

and its accompaniments to the undertaker. He learned that same morning
that the widower’s plea of poverty was, as it often proved to be with
the occupants of those slum-tenements, a mere pretence. The bereaved
descendant of Irish royalty had $12 due on that week’s work, besides
$39 in a savings bank. The man returned the coffin, etc., that morning
to the undertaker, telling him that his reverence Mr. ⸺ thought it not
good enough for the lady, and that a twenty-dollar coffin should be
sent, along with a hearse and two carriages. For payment Mr. ⸺ would be
accountable; the widower had agreed to repay him by weekly instalments.
The ingenious ruse did not succeed, for the undertaker went straight to
Mr. ⸺. Whereon the disappointed and bereaved husband went on a week’s
hard drink. The body would have been left unburied, had not Mr. ⸺ ordered
back the original cheap coffin and seen to the interment. This is the
most typical case of one type of pauperism peculiar, I believe, to the
lowest type of Irish and English paupers. It is not the opinion of this
clergyman that such abject forms of mean and servile ingratitude are
found among the most degraded class of our native Canadian tramps. It
results from social conditions which exist in the old country but not
here.

Another instance related by Mr. ⸺ illustrates what has been said already
about drunkenness being at once the source and the solace of so many of
the slum miseries; it is the atmosphere of their life, the pabulum on
which they feed, the destroyer for whom they sacrifice wife, child, and
finally life. The slum drunkenness is not that of the graceful orgies of
an opera scene—it is terribly realistic, it is the sullen sodden ivresse
of our Canadian rendering of L’Assomoir?

I proceed to tell Mr. ⸺’s terrible but true tale of women drunk on the
floor at a funeral. Mr. ⸺ was asked to undertake to read prayers at a
house in a lane out of one of the streets in St. John’s ward. On reaching
the house he found every preparation duly made, a hearse at the door, a
plain black-painted shell, with the body duly laid out within it on a
table. The people in the room were


A ROUGH-LOOKING CROWD

of both sexes, some of them younger and apparently less hardened than the
rest; all had been drinking heavily, but they received the clergyman with
high good humor, which they carried so far as to interrupt Mr. ⸺ when
he began the funeral service with groans, sighs, and remarks which were
judged appropriate. Thus the versicle, “Man that is born of a woman is
full of trouble.” Mr. ⸺ was interrupted by remarks such as, “Thrue for
yer riverence, and its meself knows it!” “His riverence is right, and
may the hivens be his bed.” All went tolerably well till Mr. ⸺ proposed
to offer a prayer, and requested all present to kneel. Now all the
assistants at this strange funeral were sufficiently sober to keep their
feet, and had the Presbyterian ritual been observed, all would have gone
well. The men managed to kneel—but the women, once they tried to kneel,
lost the center of gravity and toppled over on the floor, whereon when
Mr. ⸺ left the place, they were sprawling in the vain effort to rise!

The clergyman whose opinions I am now quoting was convinced that in
slum-life there are many cases of guiltless, undeserved poverty, not due
to drink nor to vice, but to other causes. As an instance of this, he
told me that he had been informed that a poor, hardworking widow and her
three little girls, living in a room in a tenement house on ⸺ street,
were in a state of destitution. He proceeded thither at once. In a bare,
unfurnished room, without a spark of fire, though it was February of a
severe winter, were three little girls, each covered by a single ragged
cotton garment. Their father was in a drunkard’s grave; their mother, a
frail, weak woman, was out of work. She could not earn enough to pay her
weekly rent for that poor place and provide a loaf of bread daily for her
children. It lay on the table ready for them to help themselves, but the
poor little things had but little appetite. The youngest was five years
old, the eldest seven. They lay in bed all day under the shelter of a
single coverlet, for they had


NO CLOTHES, NO SHOES, THAT WINTER DAY.

The kind-hearted clergyman at once gave good food and fuel. Grateful
warmth and nourishment followed in his wake, the little girls revived,
and in the words of the Book, whose lessons his life is devoted to carry
out, “The widow’s heart was made to sing for joy.”


A CHARLTON BILL CASE.

One of the saddest cases that had come under his experience this
clergyman related to me as follows: It will be remembered that his parish
includes that street stretching from Yonge street to College avenue,
which may well be termed the vicus sceleratus, the Wicked Street, of
Toronto. Several years ago a young lady visited him at his vestry, who
was evidently in great distress. She had the manners and appearance of
one who had been carefully and respectably brought up. Her story was
soon told. Her parents held a good position in the town of ⸺, Ontario.
She was engaged to be married to a young gentleman of good professional
prospects. Within a week of their appointed marriage, when the wedding
trousseau had been provided, he forced the unsuspecting girl to yield to
his wishes, then made an excuse for postponing the wedding day. After
several months of this deception her condition necessitated flight. He
took her to Toronto and placed her as a boarder in one of those nefarious
“high-toned” fast houses where the Mother of Infamy entertains the
daughters of death. When the girl found out the character of the place in
which she had been left by her lover, who had now wholly abandoned her,
she at once ran away, and obtained work as servant at a hotel. A day or
so afterwards she was followed by the woman (the word seems misapplied)
who kept the “high-toned” den from which she had fled. This wretch
informed the poor, trembling girl that she knew her entire history, and
would expose her if she did not return. Most unhappily the girl had not
the presence of mind either to appeal to police protection, or to throw
herself, surely not in vain, on the womanly goodness of the hotelkeeper’s
wife. She yielded, and became once more the slave of the procuress. She
now appealed to the Rev. Mr. ⸺ for aid to escape


A LIFE WHICH SHE ABHORRED.

He gave her money to go at once to London and a letter to a kind-hearted
Church of England clergyman in that city, promising to send further help
on receiving news of her arrival. He heard from her several times. Two
years afterwards he saw her again in Toronto, driving in a cab with two
other girls. She turned her face away. Once more he was summoned to visit
her. She was ill in a poor cottage on Elm street. For the last time he
visited her, when on her deathbed in a wretched tenement on Teraulay
street. She was dying, not from any disease, but simply from exhaustion,
worn out with sorrow and despair. A name that is not her own is inscribed
on the humble tombstone above her grave. Her parents, who are respectable
people in good circumstances, have never known what has become of their
lost daughter. “And the man whose selfish lust has brought about this
ruin,” said the Rev. Mr. ⸺, as he concluded the above sad and over true
story, “still walks the streets of Toronto prosperous and respected;
still has the entree of the best Toronto society. I am a clergyman but
there are times when I feel like taking a horse-whip and teaching that
fellow a lesson which in this country can only be taught by lynch law.
The Charlton Bill for making seduction a criminal offence, is necessary
if private vengeance is not to be practically legalized. It is all
nonsense to talk about the danger of black-mailing; a jury can always
judge of facts and discriminate between cases of real moral turpitude and
those which may be got up for the sake of money or intimidation.”


A BABY FARM.

A Methodist minister of much experience among the Toronto poor
corroborated to a great extent the views of his brethren. Among his more
novel experiences the following was communicated in reply to questions
about baby farming:

“Some of my most painful experiences have been in visiting ‘baby-farms,’
poor and generally narrow premises, for the most part situated in one
or other of the slums. I think the popular idea about these places is
erroneous—they are not intentionally shambles for infant lives, and
poor as their accommodation for the little waifs and strays may be, are
the only refuge of a vicious or unfortunate mother—a degree, at least,
above desertion or infanticide! I was sent for last March to visit a
sick child at one of these places, a cottage on St. David street, in the
eastern part of the city. The cottage was a small frame building of but
three rooms, in the largest of which, the ‘living room,’ were stowed
seven infants, three playing about the floor, the rest in bed. Most of
the children were pale and unhealthy-looking; they seemed to have none
of the exuberant vitality of healthy childhood; even in their play they
were languid. The little one I was called to visit was a child of six,
whose pecky, shrunken face, large dark eyes, and unnatural development of
forehead betokened the form of cerebral disease peculiar to childhood,
‘water on the brain.’ She was a gentle and intelligent little girl, and
joined in the simple prayer I offered with a winning, gentle and tired,
but earnest voice. It was her greatest wish to pass away from the world
which had been to her one busy scene of suffering, unrelieved by any
home or love beyond the casual kindness of strangers. A few days after
my visit she sank quietly into sleep—her last. She was the illegitimate
child of a young person in respectable position in society in a town
of Ontario. Her mother paid regularly for her keep, but never visited
her. Poor little Nellie! had her cradle known a mother’s knee, the first
symptoms of her sickness been met by a mother’s care, she might have
grown into a bright girl; affectionate and true I feel sure she would
have proved. But perhaps it is best so, and the heathen saying, ‘Those
whom the gods love die young,’ might be adopted as a motto by most baby
farms.”




CHAPTER XX.

A PEST HOUSE WIPED OUT.


It is the custom for people to say that evil has existed from the
beginning, and will continue till the end of all things. And as far as
anybody knows this is entirely true, but the application which a great
many put on it is entirely wrong. They make the truism an excuse for
ceasing all efforts for lessening evil and confining it to as few of our
fellow-creatures as possible. When, some 18 months ago or more, a few
gentlemen in the city got up a movement for the suppression of one of the
forms of vice which, of all others, is the most degrading, destructive,
and terrible in its results, they were met in the outset with the old
saw, “This evil has always existed and will continue to exist.” They did
not propose to be put down by such an aphorism, and they pressed their
ideas on the police authorities, the commissioners, and the magistrates
until steps were taken to scorch at least, if not altogether kill, the
viper. No one can deny one result which followed. Our principal streets,
which were formerly thronged with wantons attired in purple and fine
linen, became freed of them to such an extent that the presence of
an occasional one caused remark. In the auditoriums of our places of
amusement, where they were wont, like the Scribes and Pharisees, to
occupy the prominent places,


THEIR PAINTED FACES

and flashing jewelry were missing. This was undoubtedly the result of
a couple of months’ work. It is well known that they left the city
in droves. The heavy hand of repression has since then been removed,
and once more the soiled doves flutter their plumes on all the public
promenades. Two years ago York street was one of the worst streets on the
American Continent. It would be impossible to conceive of lower dens or
more desperate denizens than those who haunted the darksome cellars and
holes on that street. There were dozens of keepers of these places, but a
man named McQuarry occupied a bad pre-eminence above them all. McQuarry
was an addition to our population which was contributed from rural parts.
He had sold a farm and in some way or other lost the money in the city
and started a store on York street. This store rapidly became a mere
illicit drinking place and very soon was the resort of bad characters of
both sexes. The state that the street had drifted into began to attract
the notice of the newspapers, and the police also paid some attention to
the phenomena connected therewith. The result was that raids were made
on the places and severe encounters took place between the roughs and
the officers. In one case an officer was dangerously stabbed, and the
knife-user had his head battered pretty badly with the officer’s club.
Then the man with the phrase we have quoted above began to be heard from.
You couldn’t cure these things by drastic remedies. Evil always did
exist, etc. A judge on the bench at one of the trials spoke in severe
terms of the conduct of the officers. The prisoner, however, received a
pretty severe sentence. The police kept up the war unremittingly, and the
result was that at last York street was cleansed from end to end. A few
of the old habitues still prowl about, and one or two dives have ventured
to blossom forth again into existence.

In McQuarry’s den it was the custom to hold a dance weekly, and these
were perhaps


THE MOST DREADFUL FEATURES

of these wicked holes. A small fee was charged, but the proprietor
depended more on the sale of bad liquor for his profits than on this
admission. Many of the revelers had other business speculations in their
eye, and woe be to the man wearing anything of value who did not keep all
his senses about him, and even then he was not safe.

“Having paid my ten cents to a young man at the foot of the stairs,”
says an eye-witness of one of these orgies, “I descended into a cellar
whose rough stone walls had once been whitewashed, but which were now
discolored with the slimy moisture which oozed therefrom. The place was
not large, and the 12 or 15 couple who were on the floor did not have
much room in which to turn. Two colored lads supplied the music, one
playing a very wheezy concertina, and the other tooting a fife. The
company was largely composed of bad women and thieves. Here and there,
however, could be seen a man who ought to be respectable, and who usually
was accounted among his fellow-men as such. They were on the spree, and
one of them, a master plasterer, I was told had been around the place for
a week. He was sitting on a stone which had been pulled out of the wall,
with a loathsome-looking creature seated on his knee. Among the


SCORE OF WOMEN

in the place there is not one who has one redeeming look of womanhood
left. They have not that one trait which leaves a woman last—the desire
to look well. Their faces are swollen with the fiery liquids they have
been pouring into themselves all night. The men for the most part are not
nearly so repulsive. The few “suckers” who are in the room, are doing
all the treating, and as they produce their money furtive glances are
exchanged, and that man’s “roll” is spotted.

The company gets more riotous as the night proceeds and as the liquor
begins to take hold. A fight starts in one corner of the room and all
hands seem to join in. Pandemonium has broke loose.

    “At once there rose so loud a yell
      Within that dark and narrow dell,
    As if the fiends from heaven that fell
      Had pealed the battle-cry of hell.”

Women and all join in the melee, and the cursing is terrible for its
impiety and ferocity. At last the main combatants are parted, and one of
them is carried upstairs almost insensible, with blood streaming from his
chin, where his antagonist had rended a piece of flesh half off with his
teeth. The victor swaggers about with the air of a conqueror, and his
blood-covered fangs make even the boldest rough of them all tremble.

A girl entered after this, who took up a position near where I had
squeezed myself into a corner to be out of the way of fists and boots,
which were being thrown around loose a few minutes before. A glance
sufficed to show that if she was vicious vice had not yet had time to
mark her as it had the other creatures in the room. She looked a little
frightened.

“They are having a good time,” I remarked.

“Yes,” she said somewhat doubtfully, “but I wish they weren’t so rough.”

I found out that she was a servant girl who had been out with her
“fellow,” and was unable to gain admission to her house. The knave or the
fool had then taken her here. I ventured to suggest to her that this was
no place for a respectable woman, and offered to go with her in search of
a hotel, but as I found that she suspected my motives, I gave the matter
up.

I found that a new piece of fun was being promoted by the humorous
gentlemen of the house. They were carrying stories back and forth between
two of the women, so as to


PROVOKE THEM INTO A FIGHT.

In this they were successful, and the two poor misguided wretches were
soon screaming and clawing like cats on the floor. The men and women,
howling and jibbering, formed a ring about this couple of unsexed beings.
When the men were fighting the desire of every man in the room was
to assist in parting them, but when two members of that sex, who are
supposed to arouse in man all that is self-sacrificing and gallant, came
to disgrace their claim to womanhood, these wolves not only stood by,
but cheered them on to worse and worse shame.

“Come, my men,” said a spectator, thinking to appeal to the better nature
of some of the beings present, “stop this disgraceful scene.”

But he was taken hold of and hurled against the wall with oaths. Bound
not to witness what he could not remedy he made his way outside with a
lower opinion of humanity than ever he had in his life before.

“I tell you,” said a friend the other day after the conclusion of the six
days walk, “a man has more endurance than any animal.”

“Yes,” said the spectator of the McQuarry dance, “and he can be more
brutal and more ferocious.”




CHAPTER XXI.

DOWN AT THE UNION STATION.


I never could understand what attracts people to the railway station.
Go there when you will, morning, noon, or night, there are the same
or similar lollers on the waiting-room benches, the careworn women,
the crying children, the same sleepy-looking men, not forgetting the
half-devoured buns, the rinds of oranges, and the peanut shells which
litter the floor. Buns, oranges and peanuts, seem to have many admirers
among those who go away in trains. Motion is the law of life, and nowhere
does this universal decree of nature find a more striking exposition
than at the railway station. I have seen many partings there, many warm
handshakes, many tears, as I have seen many joyous meetings. I have seen
men depart, with as much baggage as would fill an express wagon, depart
amid the cheers of their friends, and I have seen the same men return
poor in health and pocket, without a hand to welcome them or a cheery
word to make them glad. I have seen men sneak up to the ticket-seller,
purchase second-class tickets,


HIDE THEMSELVES

away in second-class cars, and go away unobserved. And I have seen
the same men come back in a parlor car, rich in raiment and with many
smiling, cringing friends to meet them. The railway station is the place
to study people, from the tramp who rides in astride of the draw-heads
of a freight, to the gentleman who occupies a section in the rearmost
Pullman; from that bride over there surrounded by gushing, kissing,
hugging friends, to that other party following long black box as it is
wheeled away along the platform. The other night when I was there I
saw a great, rough, but still kind-faced man sitting by the radiator,
holding a sleeping child in his arms. She was wrapped in a red cloak, the
close-fitting hood of which could not confine two tiny straggling curls.
It was little Red Riding Hood taken from the picture, and in the grasp
of a shaggy bear. With her head nestled upon the broad breast of the man
and supported by a large, powerful-looking hairy hand, she looked out of
place. Oh, where did such a man get such a child? He


COULD NOT BE HER FATHER,

for he was rough and powerful, while she was a dainty little thing whose
appearance spoke of different surroundings from that of the man. He
looked into the fair face with solicitude, and the unoccupied paw, heavy
as it was, adjusted her cloak and fondled her as softly as a woman’s.
Then she opened her eyes, and out of the folds of her red covering crept
a delicate little hand, upon which glittered a diminutive gold ring. It
stole up to his hairy face and patted him on the cheek. Then the great
big beard and the ferocious-looking mustache swooped down upon her and
there was the sound of a kiss, and a childish ripple of laughter. I got
into conversation with the man, when he asked for information in regard
to the movements of the trains. He was going to Michigan, he said. Had a
mill there, and was a lumberman. I remarked that the beauty of his child
spoke well for Michigan. Not his child, bless her, his sister’s child.
Her father and her mother had died in a far eastern village in Canada,
his native place, and he had come from his pineries to take charge of
her. He was a bachelor, but, bless you, that would not prevent his taking
care of his little charge. Oh, no, Dolly (so he called her) would never
want for anything, and would be brought up a lady. I would have preferred
that he had said he would make a woman of her instead of a lady, seeing
that we have so many ladies and so few women, but I couldn’t venture that
freedom with him. For, whenever I hear of a girl being brought up a lady
I picture to myself


A DAMSEL WHO PLAYS ON THE PIANO

a little, can dance a little, speaks French a little and English
indifferently, and to whom the rest of the family and outsiders generally
are expected to look up. As we were talking, a woman of the street came
in and crouched on the seat near the steam-heater, for it was cold
outside and frost had followed the sunshine. Little Red Ridinghood
noticed her poor bedraggled look, and sidled up close to her.

“Are you a poor woman?” she asked in a feeling way.

“Yes, a very poor woman, God help me,” I heard the forlorn creature reply.

“Would you take some money from me?” and Red Ridinghood fumbled for
her little pocket, and having found it dropped a piece of money in the
woman’s hand.

“Won’t you shake hands with me?” she asked as the little one was moving
away.

“Oh, yes, if you are a good woman,” said Red Ridinghood, loud enough for
all to hear.

The hand-shaking did not take place, for just then a train rushed into
the station, and Dolly’s uncle, learning that it was the train he
awaited, called her, and lifting her in his arms, he nodded to me and
hastened towards the platform. Just before he went out the little red
hood popped over his shoulder, and a childish voice cried out:

“Good-bye, poor woman.”

I looked at the “poor woman” to mark the effect of the farewell. She was
leaning towards the heater, with her chin resting on her hands. There was
a bitter expression on her face. I thought I saw a tear glistening on her
cheek, but before I could satisfy myself as to this good sign she rose
abruptly and left. I saw her slink through the crowd, the scoff of men
and the scorn of women, away along the platform, through the archway, out
into the dark streets, amongst the lost whence she came.




CHAPTER XXII.

MORE ABOUT THE UNION STATION.


The vast, smoky building facing the Esplanade between York and Simcoe
streets is a great theater in which are enacted some of the strangest
scenes in life in this city. Through it day and night a tide of human
life with all its joy and misery, with all its wealth and poverty, flows
continually. East, west and north, day and night, trains go thundering
on their way, infusing fresh blood and vigor throughout all the land.
The station and its surroundings are like some mighty fort stocked with
inexhaustible supplies, sending out hourly sorties against the unlocked
resources of a great country, and coming back triumphantly, laden with
spoil for the enriching of the nations. At almost any hour of the day or
night the scene at the Union station is an interesting one, especially
to the student of human nature. Here are to be seen people of all
nationalities, Canadians and Americans predominant of course, but in
the busy throng can often be seen Swedes, Norwegians, Italians, Greeks,
Hungarians, Danes, Germans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Gipsies and Jews,
mingling strangely under the great roof. The most interesting scenes are
those witnessed on the arrival and departure of the great express trains
for the east and west. Early in the morning the big express for Montreal
and all points east leaves the station. For an hour beforehand the yard
men begin to “make up” the train and the people arrive. Sitting patiently
on their dunnage bags and rough boxes in a corner are a group of


FRENCH CANADIAN LUMBERMEN

on their way home to Quebec from the Michigan pineries. Their faces are
all bright with the expectation of being so soon back with the old folks
at home, all bright, expectant and happy, save one, who sits with his
chin in his hands and a look of sadness on his swarthy face. And why?
Because Baptiste, his young, his only brother, who had accompanied him
to the woods full of strong life and hope had been struck dead by a
falling tree not a month ago, and lay in a nameless grave beneath the
dark shadows of the Michigan woods. And this has taken all the joy and
light from the homecoming of Louis, who is wondering how he will face the
old mother at home and tell her for the first time of the tragedy which
has robbed her of her best-loved child. The crowd begins to thicken along
the platform. As I walk down through them I notice a party of prominent
politicians in a group, and on enquiry I learn that they are a deputation
to Ottawa for the purpose of interviewing the government, which will
doubtless take their suggestions into its most serious consideration.
Here is a portly merchant on his way to Montreal to look after large
consignments of goods, and to the last moment is closely attended by
his clerk, to whom he continually pours forth instructions. The nobby
gentleman, nonchalantly smoking his cigar as he coolly paces up and down,
is a


COMMERCIAL TRAVELER

about to launch himself on the unsuspecting country merchant. He has
just seen that his cases of samples have been put on board, he travels
according to the commercial tariff, the little leather bag contains
luxuries for the trip, and he feels perfectly confident and at home. He
chats with the conductor, nods to the brakesman, and offers a cigar to
the porter of the Pullman. As he stops to adjust his glasses, he rolls
his cigar in his mouth and looks up at the murky ceiling with the air
of a man who is ready for anything or anybody. These young fellows you
see there are students on their way home. By their looks they have spent
their last night in Toronto in great shape, and even now they appear
somewhat enthusiastic as they pace to and fro arm in arm. Here is a
lady bound for the distant burgh of Oshawa. She is loaded down with
flower-pots and parcels. She is red in the face, and her nose is sharp.
She is industriously trotting up and down after an official. The official
is industriously scurrying here and there to keep out of her way.
Finally, by a skilful flank movement, she captures him, and with an air
of triumph, enquires:

“What time does the 7.45 train go out, sir?”

“At 7.45, ma’am.”

“Will it go out on time?”

“Sharp on time.”

“D’ye think I would have time to go up to Smither’s store before it
starts?”

“Depends how far it is,” and the official dashes off on an imaginary
errand to escape further questioning, while the lady mentally makes up
her mind that she will write to the papers about the discourtesy of these
officials. Soon all is bustle and ferment. The old lady is hustled here
and there in a sad way. The elbow of a porter knocks a twig from one of
her plants, and she immediately sets up an outcry, which is successfully
drowned by the rumbling of


THE BIG BAGGAGE-CART,

filled with luggage, which comes lumbering along the platform, making
a lane through the throng. People out of breath come dashing into the
station, and make a bee-line for the ticket office regardless of all
obstacles. The gong sounds. Its discordant notes start the throng into
livelier motion. More people arrive out of breath and somewhat excited.
A married couple plunge along dragging a train of children after them,
who are continually getting between people’s legs. The conductor walks
up and down beside the train, answering questions pleasantly, and
nodding and chatting to acquaintances. More people arrive. The last of
the baggage has been passed into its especial car. The mails are on
board. Most of the passengers are in their seats, and, bare-headed, are
leaning out of the windows viewing the scene without. The gong sounds
again, and then a tall, red-whiskered man, with a voice like a fog-horn,
calls “A-a-all-l-l, aboard for Belleville-lle, Kingston, Montreal-l-l,
and a-a-all-l points east.” The rest of the intending passengers make
a rush for their seats, there is hand-shaking through the windows, a
pretty girl standing well back kisses her hand at a certain window, the
conductor sings cheerily, “All aboard!” the locomotive goes “Toot, toot!
fizz-whizz, fizz-whizz!” the great wheels revolve, and the morning train
for the east is gone.




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE NIGHT EXPRESS.


The lights are burning dimly in the Union station—they never burn
brightly in a station, somehow—and it is an hour before the night express
starts on its noisy triumphant journey west. Down the vista of the long
platform a couple of noisy young women are sauntering. Their peals of
laughterless laughter—if I may coin an expression—ring through the
resonant place. The baggageman, who knows me, beckons me to a seat beside
him on a big iron-bound truck, and remarks that the girls are here again.

“Do they often come here?”

“Almost every night, and others, too. They are respectable girls for all
I know, but the Union station has a fascination for them somehow. They
flirt with the brakemen and the Pullman car conductors, and sometimes
make a mash on a young swell from the country as he comes off the train.
They are mighty sharp and shrewd, I tell you.”

“Hullo,” said I, looking behind me, “is that a coffin?”

“Yes,” said the baggageman carelessly,


“THAT’S A COFFIN

with a stiff in it. Come down from Winnipeg this afternoon and no one has
come around to claim it yet. There’s lots of ’em nowadays. They’re coming
an’ going all the time. We shipped one chap to San Francisco last night.
They are a horrible bother. Wonder what they want to do it for. This
stiff is bound for Milwaukee. If they had buried him here he would have
heard Gabriel blow his trumpet as plain in Toronto as he would in the
Western States. They’re a most mighty bother.”

“I should say so,” said a train hand standing near. “I’ll never forget
the experience I had with one.”

Seeing the look of interest on my face, he blew the ashes off his cigar
and continued:

“I was runnin’ on No. 4, from Hamilton through to Detroit and one dark
night they put a stiff aboard at Harrisburg. That was all right, but
when they put another aboard at Paris I felt they were givin’ it to me
too much. I was alone in the car, and tho’ I ain’t scared of ghosts and
that, yet I didn’t feel just to home. There’s no fun in ridin’ along
in the dark with a couple of stiffs, now I tell you. There I sot, and
for the life of me I couldn’t keep my eyes off them coffins. There lay
two dead men with their wooden overcoats on, and there I sot smokin’
my pipe and feelin’ ornery. Something got loose under the car, and the
knockin’ underneath sounded to me as if one of them had come to life and
was tappin’ on the lid of his coffin fur me to let him out. You needn’t
laugh, it was no joke. It was a ride I’m not going to forgit in a hurry,
either. Well, I pulled through all right, an’ run into Detroit in the
mornin’. A hearse was drawed up, but when we got the coffins out we found
that the label cards had been knocked off, and we didn’t know which was
which. We couldn’t ask the stiffs themselves, you know. One old man came
up, and with tears in his eyes said he wouldn’t like to plant anybody
in his lot but his own blood relations. Well, we opened the coffin, and
I hope I may die if it wasn’t plugged plum full of smuggled silks and
laces.”

“No stiff in it at all?”

“Stiff! naw; but the other stiff was the genuine article, and the old man
driv off after it in great shape, as happy as a clam, yes, sir.”

“Did they ever find out who smuggled the goods?”

“No; but they never tried that trick on again, that I know of.”

Here I noticed a detective sauntering up and down the platform.

“Well, John,” said I, “what’s on to-night, anything up?”

“Just wait a while and you’ll see,” with that wise and knowing air
which only a detective can assume. At that moment the headlight of the
locomotive drawing the train from Hamilton appeared at the west end of
the station, and the detective suddenly became very alert. He stood
midway on the platform, and as the train came to a standstill and the
passengers came pouring out he scanned the features of every one who
stepped upon the platform. Suddenly he made a swift little movement,
dived through the crowd, dodged round a kissing and hand-shaking group and


LAID HIS HAND ON THE SHOULDER

of a middle-aged man, accompanied by a young woman. I was quite close by,
and couldn’t hear what was whispered in his ear, but the change that came
over that man’s face was something terrible to see. He turned white, then
red, and finally a greenish yellow shade settled on his wild and drawn
face. Like a boy caught stealing apples he whined, “let me go, let me
go; oh, for God’s sake let me go.” He shook like a man with ague, and
he would have fallen only the detective’s firm hand sustained him. The
girl by his side was, as far as outward appearance was concerned the most
self-possessed of the two, but her startled eyes and pale face told that
she, too, was suffering. A curious crowd had gathered round, from which
the detective skilfully extricated them, and then the trio made their
way to the Central station. They were searched, and a large quantity of
money found on both of them, but the girl was allowed to go to an hotel,
while the man, weeping like a baby, was taken down into the cells. He
went down like a drunken man, stunned, helpless, miserable. The story may
be interesting. He was a country storekeeper, influential, respected,
trusted. He was a Sunday school teacher, he led at prayer-meeting, he was
a delegate to conference, he was grand patriarch of a temperance lodge,
he conducted family prayer in his house morning and evening, in fact he
was looked up to as a model man. He had a wife and six children. The
former was sickly. He engaged a girl young and inexperienced in the world
to assist his wife in household work. She attended his bible class and
looked up to him as


A SUPERIOR BEING.

He wasn’t a bad man as the world goes, but he was not a strong man
morally. He and the girl made a mistake, he, because he was morally
weak—she because she believed that he could do nothing wrong. From that
hour he began his downward career. He borrowed, embezzled and even stole
money, and one afternoon by a preconcerted plan the pair took the train
for Toronto. Deluded wretch, swift as went the train bearing him away, he
thought forever, from the scene of his misdeeds, a tiny wire string along
the track bore a message swift as thought past him. So swift indeed, that
a detective had time to go home, eat a quiet supper, and walk leisurely
down to the Union station and smoke a good cigar on the platform while
waiting for the victims that were sure to come. And all this time the
pair were sitting in the railway carriage planning schemes for the
future, and never dreaming of what was before them. The man was sent back
to his own county for trial, and the girl’s father came down a few days
afterwards and took her home.

The express going west had made up by this time, and the crowd on the
platform was thickening. Cabs and omnibusses rattled down York and
Simcoe streets and drew up on the Esplanade front. A large group of
well dressed people, flowery with buttonhole and hand bouquets, smiles,
and laughter came sweeping in. In the center of the group is a handsome
girl, with flushed face and unnaturally bright eyes, whose every motion
is nervous and constrained. She is neatly dressed in a brown traveling
suit and holds a superb bouquet in her trembling hand. By her side, with
a self-satisfied look of proprietorship and triumph, stands a gentleman
who glances with no little impatience in his eyes, first at the train and
then at the group around him. But with the first clang of the gong


THE PARTY GROWS QUIETER.

A constraint falls upon them. With the clang of the discordant note the
bride turns pale, and a wild look comes into her startled eyes. She
trembles visibly, for in this train her new-made husband is to bear her
off to a strange land among strangers. All old associations are broken
to-night, all her old loves and delights are cut from her, the faces and
scenes so dear to her she may never see again, she will never be to those
about her what she once was, and all to go with this man for better, for
worse. They put their arms around her neck and kiss her till all at once
she bursts into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. She clings to them
desperately till, led into the car, she folds her arms about her husband,
now her only hope and stay, her father, mother, brother, counsellor,
companion and friend from this time onward and forever. A man with hat
over his eyes darts into the station, buys his ticket, and has his foot
on the steps when my friend John, the detective, taps him on the shoulder
and smilingly says, “Not to-night, Dickey, my boy, you must come up to
the station and explain some things first.” Who is this leaning on that
old man’s arm. A young man


GOING HOME TO DIE.

His face is white as death and almost transparent, his eyes are fearfully
bright, his fevered lips have shrunk from his dry, white teeth, his body
is emaciated, and his step is feeble and slow. Going home to die! Not
two years ago he came to the city, robust and strong, full of life and
hope; to-night he is going home with his poor old father to die in the
arms of his mother, who is waiting, waiting, waiting for him in the old
farm-house far away.

“See that old chap there with the glum look?” whispers John, the
detective.

“Yes.”

“Well, go and interview him; he’s been cleaned out by confidence men.”

I went up to the old gentleman, and after some trouble got him to talk.
He was spitting tobacco juice right and left in a vicious manner, and
his lower jaw was chewing away as if it went by clock-work. His tuft of
iron-grey beard fairly wagged with righteous indignation.

“I was a standin’ on the platform here this aft’noon, a-waitin’ fur the
train to go home, when two right-smart young fellows kem up, an’ sez
they, ‘Hillo! old John Hess, what on airth air you a-doin’?’ Got the
advantage uv me,’ says I, ‘don’t know yah!’ ‘What,’ sez they, ‘don’t know
old man Turkman’s nevies?’ Sez I, ‘Be you Levi Turkman’s sister Maria’s
boys eh?’ Says they, ‘why of course,’ an’ we got a-talking about Toronto
and politics, an’ religion, an’ the crops, when who shud come up to one
of ’um but a man who wanted pay for freight, er somethin’ er another.
Well one uv these chaps pulls out a hundred-dollar bill, but the man sed
he couldn’t change it no how. They then asked me to lend them the money,
$69.47, and I


COULD KEEP THE $100 BILL

till we went up town and changed it. I forks it out convenient like, and
tuk the $100 bill, and the three of um went off to see about the freight,
an’ I haven’t seen a sight on ’em since.”

“And the $100 bill?”

“Ain’t worth shucks! and they ain’t old man Turkman’s nevies no more nor
you be. Ef I had the consarned cheats here now I cud lick a ten-acre
field full on ’em. Bin a huntin’ all over town fur ’em, but ’taint no
use. Dang the town ennyway.”

Here comes a lady with her dear little boy—one of those dear little boys
who makes the ordinary traveler just ache to spank him.

“Maw!” he says, “where you goin’ to?”

“I want to see the conductor, dear.”

“Maw! wot’s a conductor?”

“He has charge of the train, dear.”

“Maw! wot does he do that for?”

“For a salary, dear.”

“Maw! wot’s a salary?”

“Oh, dear, don’t bother me.”

“Maw, w’y won’t you let your little boy bother you?”

“Hush, I want to speak to the conductor.”

“Maw, wot you goin’ to speak to the conductor for?”

“I want to know if the train stops at Guelph.”

“Maw, is that where my gran’paw lives?”

“No, he lives in Goderich.”

“Maw, wot does he live there for?” and so on endlessly.

The crowd thickens, the gong strikes, the cheering “all-aboard” of the
conductor is heard, and in a few minutes the night express is darting
like a meteor through the darkened land.




CHAPTER XXIV.

THE EMIGRANT TRAIN.


It seems that when the rain is falling, when the air is chill, when
the darkness is deepest and when the great station looks most gloomy
and dreary, the emigrant train arrives. As the train draws in and
slowly passes me to its allotted space the faces that I see through
the dirty windows are tired and worn and the eyes are hollow and sad.
I went through an emigrant train one night and I will never forget the
experience. The emigrants were chiefly Irish, English and Swedes. Some
of them stayed here in Toronto but the majority were bound for points
farther west. As I opened the door of the first car a blast of hot, foul
air smote me in the face and almost turned me sick, and yet the people
whom I saw before me seemed to mind it but little. They were used to
it and it was a great improvement on the poisonous atmosphere of the
steerage. The car was closely packed, every seat had more than its quota.
It was impossible to see to the far end of the car on account of a steam
which fermented the place and made the faces of people in the middle of
the car look obscure and distorted. The emigrants were in every attitude
and conceivable posture; some were lying prone on the floor, others were
huddled in the seats, while others, with arms entwined, were resting
their heads on each others’ shoulders. One whole family, man and wife and
six children, were squeezed into two seats in the most amazing manner.
The parents formed a sort of under strata on which the little children
were piled promiscuously. They were all asleep,


THEIR ARMS ENTWINED,

their cheeks touching, and their spirits winging through dreamland
back to the good land of Sweden far away. Utterly unconscious of their
surroundings or of the great city into which they had entered, ignorant
of the fact that they had halted at one of the chief stopping places on
their journey, they slept on, and as I watched them and saw their lips
move and the unintelligible words drop forth, I knew that they spoke of
home. One poor man with bowed head was weeping quietly, and I asked him
what ailed him.

“Oh, sir, she died in Monthrehal.”

“Who died in Montreal?”

“Me wife, sor, the voyidge killed her sor; oh, wirra, wirra, why did I
bring her away.”

Three little children were clinging to his knees and looking up at me
with wondering eyes. The man glanced up through his tears, which he
struck from his eyes with his shut fists.

“Sure I’m better off than that poor crathur yonder—go an’ shpake to her,
sor.”

The woman he pointed out was sitting alone in her seat. She was young and
good looking, but her face was drawn and pinched with some sudden and
bitter woe. Her baby was wrapped in a dark shawl, lying very still, and
she rocked it gently in her arms, and talked to it in cooing voice.

“Is your baby sick?”

“No sir.”

“It is sleeping then?”

“Yes sir, my baby is sleeping.”

A little girl who was on her knees beside the woman lifted the shawl from
the sleeper’s face. The baby was dead! The mother looked up with


A QUICK SHUDDER OF FEAR,

and with a world of pity in her startled eyes.

“Oh, sir, don’t tell them, they would take my baby away, and he would
never see it.”

“Who would never see it?”

“It’s her husband she manes,” said the sympathetic emigrant at my side.
“He sint fur her from Michigan. The wee choild was born after he left,
and she wants to bring him his baby dead or alive, poor craythur.”

“When did it die?”

“This soide of Kingston, sor. Shure the railway min don’t know it yit,
and there she has been houldin’ that dead baby in her arrums ever since.”

“I want t’ let him see it, sir; I want t’ let Miles see his baby,” and
bending over the little dead body the hot tears fell on the somber shawl.

In a far corner with their arms about one another, and with her head
lying on his breast, sat a young married couple who were going west to
seek their fortune. What a strange bridal trip! She was in a troubled
slumber, but he was painfully awake. Finally she awoke and looked about
her with an expression of alarm on her tired face, but when her eyes met
his a swift smile of gladness chased all fear away, and she nestled her
face on his shoulder again, and clasped her arms about his neck.

“Jim,” she said, softly, “I was dreaming of home—I thought I saw the old
bridge, and the chapel on the hill where we were married, and I thought
I saw mother comin’ down past the boreen, and she was callin’ to me,
‘Katie, Katie, where are you, asthore?’ and it wakened me.”

The girl sat erect, looking straight in her husband’s eyes. “Jimmy,” she
cried, “take me home again.” A look of pain swept over his face. She saw
it, and with a woman’s swift repentance she flung herself upon his breast
and was silent.

A look of utter weariness bordering on misery sat on one and all.

“Well, this is the divil’s own counthry, to be sure,” said a very
surprised and somewhat frightened-looking immigrant to me.

“How’s that?”

“Ye see that wee gurrul sittin’ there?”

He pointed to a Swedish girl who looked as if she had been crying very
recently.

“Well, be me sowl, it’s no loi, but a mon kem aboard awhile ago, and
while the craythur was asleep he stole her beyootiful yellow hair wid a
pair of shayers, be gob!”

“It seems to have frightened you?”

“Thrue for you. I saw a man on the platform above wid only wan leg, an’
bedad it wouldn’t surprise me if he tried to shtale one av moine.”

I jumped off, laughing at the fellow’s downright uneasiness, and in a few
moments the train drew out from the sheds.




CHAPTER XXV.

THE WRECKING TRAIN.


In the morning, as I have watched the conductors, engineers, and trainmen
trooping down to the Union station, and marked one of them, a fine,
hearty, lusty, fellow, I have wondered if he would ever come back. A
collision, a pitch-in, a broken rail, or a low bridge are possibilities
always before them. I was in the Union station one afternoon when a
wrecking train came in from the east, bringing the crew and portable
parts of a train which had been wrecked by a pitch-in away down the line.
Four of the train-hands, including the engineer, had been hurt, some of
them seriously, and to see the fine young fellows, all broken and hurt,
lifted out of the car to be sent to the hospital, was most sad. On the
platform stood an old woman, who, on seeing her boy borne out, broke into
bitter weeping.

“Oh, Johnny, Johnny, my boy, my boy! Didn’t I always want you to keep
away from them awful trains? Don’t take my Johnny to the hospital. I’ll
nurse him—indeed, indeed, good gentlemen, I can nurse my Johnny better
than anyone.” Then the subtle woman rose up in her. “Is his face hurted?
Will he be disfigured? No, thank God! Oh, but he was a pretty boy.”

“How did it happen?” I enquired.

“Freight train ahead of us lost her grip on a grade. The brakes wouldn’t
hold and she broke away and run back and we pitched into her.”

“I suppose your engineer stuck to his place?”

The train hand smiled a superior smile.

“You bet he did; catch Bill leaving his post while there is any show to
do anything.”

One man had his leg broken, another had his breast crushed, the engineer
had sustained fatal internal injuries, and Johnny had his shoulder
crushed. These things don’t bother railway men much. In a few months
after all hands, with the exception of the engineer, were back at their
work again as devoid of fear and careless of consequences as ever.


CONDUCTORS’ EXPERIENCES.

“There is a sameness about our lives which makes it monotonous,” said
Conductor B—as he lit a cigar and reflectively tossed the match into the
gutter.

“Yes, but you have a variety, surely.”

“Yes, but this variety becomes the regular thing, and I tell you it
gets monotonous; still what we see may perhaps be worth reproducing in
print. The latest thing that I remember as peculiar is this: I noticed a
well-dressed, middle-aged lady on the train every day going to Toronto
and coming back. She was as regular as clockwork, always wore the same
highly respectable clothes, never had any baggage, always sat alone and
never spoke to me. She made the trip with us every day for two weeks
steady and I began to get interested in her. Just when I was getting
thoroughly puzzled as to who she could possibly be, she disappeared.”

“Well.”

“Well, she was a mad woman, that’s all. As crazy as a bedbug and this
railroading was a mad fancy. She broke out bad at last and they had to
put her in the asylum. It makes me cold to think of what she might have
done had she broke out in the car.”

“Have you thrown off any tramps?”

“Oh, that’s an old story and we get used to it by degrees. I remember one
thoroughbred, however, who was a dandy. I was running from Hamilton and I
found out he had neither money nor ticket, so I put him off at Waterdown.
I thought that settled him, but in going through the cars I found him on
the rear platform, looking as comfortable as you please. I jilted him off
at Bronte and told him that if he got on again I would paralyze him. When
we reached Oakville the station-master told me that a man had ridden
in on the cowcatcher. I went forward and caught my joker sitting on the
pilot smoking a clay pipe.


I FIRED HIM OUT

of that, but when I was collecting tickets for Mimico I found him sound
asleep in a cushioned chair in a first-class coach. I kicked him this
time, but when we got to the Queen’s wharf he jumped down from the top
of one of the coaches and disappeared in the darkness. Oh, he was a
thoroughbred, I tell you. When I was a freight conductor I used to have
a lot of trouble with them. I soon was able to distinguish between the
regular tramp and the poor fellow who was in a hole and trying to get
home to his friends. That kind of a man I would give a lift to, but the
others, you bet, I give them the grand bounce every time. I have caught
them riding astride of the bumpers; I have caught them under the car
swinging by the rods; I have caught them in the bonded cars, in the
cattle cars, anywhere they could get, and always bounced them. They are a
funny crowd.”

“Have you much trouble with gamblers and crooks on the cars?”

“Not much now, but we used to, though. The line from Detroit east is
still infested with them. They are confidence men and three-card monte
players chiefly. You know what three-card monte is, and how it is worked,
don’t you? Well, one night a man rushed into the car where I was and
told me he had been swindled at cards. I went out, and when I entered
the coach where the deed had been done three men rose from their seats,
darted to the other end of the train and jumped off. We were going at
the rate of forty miles an hour through a rough country, and I was sure
they would be killed, but I never heard of them after—they escaped by a
miracle. On another division of the road, however, a gambler jumped off
and paid the penalty of his crookedness by breaking his neck.”




CHAPTER XXVI.

MILLIE’S FIVE CENT PIECE.


While looking over his exchanges the other day THE NEWS editor clipped
from the Switchellville Recorder a two-column article with five headings,
the first of which was “Kidnapped,” in flaring letters. The article,
dealing as it did with an erring woman, who had fled to the city, seemed
to him to touch in some way or other the night side of city life, and
in that connection interested him. It led off as follows: “Man is
born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, but few are called upon to
bear as much trouble as our wealthy but unfortunate fellow-townsman,
Mr. Switchell. All will remember when he brought home to his handsome
residence a beautiful wife. None will forget the advent of his little
daughter. Everyone was sorry when he was prostrated with fever, and
recovered only to find himself almost entirely deaf, or “very hard of
hearing,” as the phrase goes; but the climax of sympathy was reached two
months ago, when his young wife, after eight years of married life, grew
tired of her deaf husband and eloped with Dr. Clarke, a man who has only
been known to the people of this village one year, but who in that time
has contrived to swindle almost every one of them. But a still greater
blow has fallen upon him. His little daughter Millie, who had all her
mother’s beauty combined with her father’s integrity, and a certain
sweetness of her own, has disappeared. The neighboring country has been
diligently searched, without result, and the conclusion is inevitable
that the child has been kidnapped by her


BEAUTIFUL, BUT ERRING MOTHER.

No one who knew Millie will wonder at it. The only wonder is how the
mother could have lived so long without her; but the sympathy of all will
be with the deserted husband and lonely father. Poor little Millie! The
villain Clarke will soon desert her mother whom he has already debauched,
and she will drift into a life of still deeper shame. Pure as Millie is,
she cannot but suffer from contact with such associations. It is this
thought that has almost driven her father crazy. Oh, if men and women,
before yielding to evil impulses, would remember that the little children
must suffer for it, what a different world this would be.”

The article was continued to much the same effect through two columns.
As the NEWS editor finished reading a letter bearing the Switchellville
postmark was handed to him. It was from THE NEWS correspondent at that
place, and read as follows:—“Read the Recorder for big sensation. Since
the Recorder was printed a domestic in the employ of Mr. Switchell has
confessed that she bought a ticket for Toronto at the request of the
child, who was determined to go off in search of her mother.” THE NEWS
editor said to himself “If the wanderings of that child could be followed
up they would make an interesting addition to the gaslight scenes.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“Whatcher cryin’ about, little girl?” said a red-haired, freckled-face,
ragged boy, with a bundle of papers under his arm as he looked
sympathetically at a well-dressed little girl who was wiping away with
her handkerchief


THE TEARS THAT HAD ESCAPED

from her eyes despite a brave effort to keep them where they belonged.
“Whatcher cryin’ about, is yer lost?” “No, I’m not, but my mamma is. A
bad man lost her, and I’m trying to find her for my papa and me, ’cause
we’re homesick without her.”

“Where do yer live?”

“Away, way off. I took my money from my little savings bank, and Mary
bought a ticket to bring me to Toronto. She said everybody came here, and
she guessed my mamma was here. I’ve just got five cents left.”

“Bully,” said the boy, “that’s just enough. If you want anything you can
get it by advertising in THE NEWS for five cents.”

“Where’s that?”

“You just go down that street there until you come to the winder where
all the picters is, and that’s THE NEWS.”

       *       *       *       *       *

“How many papers do you want, little girl?” said a clerk in the business
office of THE NEWS, as he put his head through a wicket to take a
five-cent piece which a child was holding up.

“I don’t want any papers. I want my mamma,” said the child.

“Your mamma isn’t here, little girl. What is your name?”

“Millie Switchell, and I come to Toronto to find my mamma, but it’s so
big I’m almost lost myself.”

“So you want to put an ad in THE NEWS, do you?”

“Will that find her?”

“Perhaps so.”

The news editor had entered the room while this dialogue was going on and
he


RECOGNIZED THE CHILD.

A dispatch was sent to her father, and before he arrived Millie was
persuaded that the better way would be to allow some one well acquainted
with the city to continue the search. The father on his arrival said: “It
may be asking too much, but I wish you would suppress the names. If you
must tell the story call me Switchell and the village Switchellville.
The people in my neighborhood will understand the case just as well with
those names, and very few of your other readers will know that the names
are incorrect. I am sensitive enough myself, but would ask no favors
were it not that the publication of names might have a bad effect on the
child’s future.”

Sympathy got the better of journalistic instinct, and the real names do
not appear.




CHAPTER XXVII.

THE JAIL.


The jail is a place towards which the night-hawk gravitates as naturally
and as irresistibly as Newton’s apple to the ground. They disappear for a
season, and when they resume their operations in the haunts of men they
will tell you that they have “just put in a month,” or more, as the case
may be. The corrective influences of jails is a much debated point, but
there can be no doubt that men are admitted to the jails or other penal
institutions who learn such a lesson thereby that they determine that
their first taste of such a thing shall also be their last.

The writer remembers getting a very graphic account of his experiences
from a gentleman who is still living in the city, and who dates his
reformation from habits of insobriety from a police magistrate’s
commitment to prison. The gentleman will of course recognise whose pen
traced these lines, but as his name will not appear in the course of the
story, and as his fate may serve to “point a moral and adorn a tale,” the
liberty is taken of reproducing his confidences as nearly as possible in
his own words.

“From my eighteenth to my twenty-third year I had been gradually piling
up for myself a taste for “bumming.” After business was done in the store
I could not rest in the house at night, although I had as pleasant a
home as ever a young man had. My sisters devised all sorts of schemes to
interest me and keep me at home. At tea-table, without seeming to wish to
inform me of the matter, they would be discussing among themselves


THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND BEAUTY

of some young lady friend of theirs whom they expected there that night.
But it was all to no purpose. I had made the acquaintance of a gang of
fellows and I can only describe myself as being infatuated with their
society. If I had been compelled to stay away from them for one night I
think I would have burst. I have often thought the matter over since and
I have come to the conclusion that my liking for the society of these
fellows lay in vanity. The most of our evenings were spent in saloons,
where we drank and talked, and sometimes sang. I always did my best
to amuse and please, and it was very flattering to my vanity to find
that I was apparently successful in doing so. My companions laughed and
applauded whenever I spoke. I will not say how much their smiles were
inspired by the round of drinks which was sure to follow an unusual burst
of laughter.

This way of spending my evenings soon began to tell its tale. I became
a source of sorrow and anxiety to all my friends, and as I became
more addicted to liquor I decidedly descended in the estimation of my
employers. Formerly all my drinking was done at nights; now it became
necessary for me to take an “eye-opener” in the mornings, and finally I
drank all day long, taking all sorts of excuses to slip out and have a
nip. I tell you honestly, Jack, there is no sort of liquor sold over a
bar whose taste I like. I know of no drug that is more distasteful to
my sense of taste and smell than the strong liquors, whisky, brandy,
gin, rum, and I can’t say much better of beer. Yet I used to pour all
these down my throat, concealing as much as possible the wry face I was
inclined to make at them. I found myself at length out of a situation. I
now


DRANK HARDER THAN EVER

to drown my chagrin. Even at this day, when I look back to that time, I
experience a sense of humiliation and shame that makes me fear to look
my fellow-man in the face. I never yet preached a temperance sermon to
any man; perhaps because I feel I have no right to, but I say to you
that I am firmly convinced that drink deadens everything that is best
in man. Let a young man be distinguished for his domestic affections,
for gratitude, for chivalry to woman, or any other noble quality, and
then let him take to drink, and as sure as night succeeds day piece by
piece these virtues will vanish from his character, and be succeeded
by brutal indifference, selfishness, and weak wilfulness. During these
years my family viewed my decadence with almost silent grief. My mother
would sometimes gently remonstrate with me after I got very bad, but it
appeared as if I could not stay myself. I frequently woke in the morning
and found the clothing and boots, which I knew had been mud-bespattered
almost beyond redemption in the debauch of the night before, brushed and
tidied into respectability once more by my sisters’ loving hands. This
touched me so that I determined to do better, but the resolutions were
mighty sickly ones, and seldom outlived the day. I was six months out
of employment, and during that time did nothing but waste my days in
taverns, sulking about like a criminal until I got enough liquor in me to
make me feel bold. Oh, when I think of that six months my blood boils.
Sometimes I was away from home for two or three days at a time.


ONE NIGHT I GOT “PULLED IN”

by a policeman, and woke up next morning a prisoner in the cells. But
I did not know that fact when I woke up. I was lying on a hard floor,
but that did not surprise me, as I had frequently had that as a waking
experience. I looked about me for a few minutes, and found that I was not
alone in the room. Several other men were lying on the floor. The stench
in the place was sickening. “Where can I be?” I said, and I tried to
recall the events of the night before. Just as I was trying to do so the
chimes of St. James’ cathedral rang out, and like the thrust of a cruel
sword the thought darted through my head, “My God, I’m in the police
cells.”

I must have been still full of liquor, but that thought brought
consciousness and soberness at once. I sat up against the wall, and oh,
what bitter thoughts thronged through my brain! In spite of me, the
great hot tears welled from my eyes. The hero in the Silver King, which
I saw at the Grand, says, “O God, roll back Thy universe, and give me
yesterday!” These were not the words I used, but that was the thought.
Oh, if I could only have avoided this last dreadful crowning shame of
all! But, sir, I thought things in that cell that have saved my life.
It was a bitter experience, but it has proved salutary. I could tell
you every thought I had from the time I woke in the morning until I was
put in the prisoners’ dock a few minutes before ten. One prayer was
predominant in my mind, and that was that my people would never hear
of my disgrace. I was assured by my fellow-prisoners that, it being my
first offence, I would be discharged. Well, I was brought into the court
and placed in the prisoner’s dock. I had an idea that I presented an
appearance of respectability in contradistinction to


THE FROUSY BESOTTED WRETCHES

who were my companions in misery. But nobody with whom I came into
contact gave forth any sign that my appearance was not in consonance
with my position. The policemen pulled me here and there with as great
disrespect as if I were the veriest bummer. I at length recognized
that I was not only a bummer but that I looked like one. When I was
asked to stand up I did so, and while I was engaged in wondering what
the great gaping crowd of loafers in the court thought about me, a man
had testified that I had broken a window, and the magistrate imposed a
fine of $1 and costs or twenty days’ imprisonment. I could not quite
understand this sentence. I knew I hadn’t a cent in my pockets, but I
could not believe that for lack of $4 I would suffer the indignity of
imprisonment. Oh, it could not be. It was a wild, improbable dream.
But the drama moved on with relentless step, and presently I and a lot
of other miserable creatures were driven into the jail van like a lot
of dumb brutes. There is no use in dwelling on my feelings. One hopeful
feature of my case was that I did not blame anybody but myself. As
I thought what and where I might be and what and where I was I kept
repeating to myself, “Yes, I am insane.” I said that a score of times,
and thought I could offer good evidence in support of the assertion.

The van swept in at the jail gate and landed her vagrant load on the
stone steps of the imposing institution. Our names, occupations,
religious belief, etc., were entered in a book. Dinner was over before
we got there and the new arrivals had to wait till supper-time for food.
This was no deprivation to me, as I could not have eaten a Delmonico
dinner, let alone the bill of fare prepared by a prison cook. We were
searched and sent to our corridors. In the one to which I was assigned
there were about a dozen fellows, mostly young, who treated me with more


CORDIALITY AND FAMILIARITY

than was agreeable to me. A turnkey came in, however, soon after and took
them all out with the exception of myself and three or four others. I
was then left to commune with my thoughts. I had not been in the prison
half an hour before I was not only willing but anxious that my friends
should know of my whereabouts. I shall go mad if I am left here over
night, I thought. Then I reflected that someone who knew me would see
my name in the papers and that I would soon be rescued from my horrible
position. I felt that if I stayed there twenty-four hours I would lose my
self-respect beyond recovery.

One by one the hours of the afternoon wore away. The suspense in which I
was held during that time was unbearable. Every step on the stair made
me hold my breath and almost stilled the beating of my heart. If any one
looked in at the grated corridor door their features assumed the shape
of some one of my friends. At length those who had been working outside
came in and soon after we were marshalled out and proceeded in Indian
file to supper. I fairly loathed the thought of food, and the chunk of
bread and pannikin of pasty porridge which were the only articles of the
menu, unless you include water and salt, were not calculated to tickle
one’s fancy. There were no tables, the benches on which we sat having to
be utilized for both table and chair. Interpreting my look of disgust, my
right and left hand companions shared between them my supper, much to
the disgust of the fellow behind me, who said he had asked me first.

Immediately after supper we were locked up in our cells for the night.
That was my night of nights. Up till midnight I did nothing but


LISTEN WITH STRAINING EAR

to every sound of the great building. Through the high dome, off which
the corridors run, even a foot-fall echoes with funereal hollowness.
In the early part of the night the door-bell rang very frequently, and
at every peal my heart rose in my throat. “That must be them,” I kept
repeating, but as each time I was doomed to disappointment I began to
give way to despair. About midnight I lapsed into a peculiar condition
of mind. I was quite awake, but half of the time I thought there was
someone in the cell who, although he said no word, yet I knew to be
sneering at my mental promises of reform. I had not expressed to him any
promise of reform, but I thought he could read what was in my mind, and
he thought me a coward. My anger at this would occasionally rouse me out
of this hallucination, but again and again I lapsed into it. How I hated
this accusing, sneering being whom my distempered fancy had conjured up.
Murder was in my heart towards him. I have thought over my experiences
of that night until I can go through the whole series of my thoughts as
readily as I could through the scenes of some familiar drama.

About an hour after daybreak a bell was rung, which was a signal for
us to get up and dress and tidy up our cells. A procession of male
chambermaids carrying slop-buckets was then started for the yard. This
duty being done, we were marched in to breakfast. I was not hungry, but I
was weak and trembling in every limb. I knew that this was the effect of
want of food, and I determined to eat something whether I felt like it or
not. When I found, however, that


A POUND OF DRY BREAD

and unlimited water and considerable salt was the bill of fare, my
revolted appetite refused to be led into such pastures. As before, my
rations were eagerly seized by my fellow-prisoners.

When Turnkey Allan came in for the working squad after breakfast, he
chose me as a member of it. This frightened me almost to death. I had
visions of men working on the roads in chains, and I said tremulously
that I wasn’t able to work. “Oh, you’ll feel better outside. You won’t
have to work very hard.” So out I went wheeling a barrow with a pick and
shovel in it. The squad were engaged in taking clay out of a bank on the
hill beside the jail, and were wheeling it down to the road. No one who
has not undergone captivity, can understand the feelings of a prisoner.
It was a lovely summer day this, and as I looked from the brow of the
hill up and down the wide-reaching valley of the Don, I could not believe
that I could not obey my own inclinations, but was bound to submit my
goings and comings to the will of the two turnkeys who were in charge of
the squad. I was very weak, and I thought my heart must break.

“Here, B⸺,” said one of the turnkeys named Norris, “take hold of this
wheelbarrow.”

They were very considerate to me, giving me very small loads of clay, but
nevertheless in half an hour my hands were so blistered that the handles
of the infernal vehicle seemed as if they were red-hot. At length I fell
on my knees from pure exhaustion—prostrated in mind and body.

“He’s not able to work,” said one of the other prisoners.

“Let him lie on the bank,” said one of the turnkeys to the other. “He’ll
be better out here than inside.”

And he was right. I lay in the warm sun, and presently began to
experience a feeling of hunger. Just as I was experiencing this hopeful
sensation I heard some one say on the bank below, “Where is that man B⸺?”


MY HEART GAVE A GREAT THROB,

the blood rushed into my head, and everything swam before me. I did not
swoon, however. I was taken back to the jail by the turnkey, who had been
sent for me. There I found my sister talking with the deputy-governor. I
could not speak; I shook her hand. I was taken upstairs and had my own
clothes restored to me, and in ten minutes was walking down the hill. The
evulsion of feeling was so great that I had no sense of shame. I simply
felt like a new man—and I was. That jail experience of mine was the
turning point of my life. I determined to stay right in the city here and
live down my disgrace. For six weeks I went out every morning and looked
for work, but without success. I returned to my home every evening and
stayed there. It was very discouraging, and required all the resolution
I was capable of to keep myself from slipping back. One day I went to my
present employer. I had heard that he wanted a junior bookkeeper. I told
him my whole story. He engaged me. That was over five years ago, and I
am there yet.”




CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE STREET ARABS.


The night-hawks of a great city like Toronto are not confined to men and
women. Boys and girls, and even children of more tender years, fill a
place in the ranks. They are, therefore, deserving of some attention,
which I intend they shall receive. The poor homeless, friendless little
outcasts, who make the street their home because they haven’t a better
one to go to, are those of whom I wish particularly to speak. They are
the sport of chance and the children of misfortune. They find themselves
in the midst of the stern battle of life, fighting for an existence,
years before the children of well-to-do parents have taken the first
step toward preparing themselves for the fray. It is not a matter of
astonishment that the majority of them grow up to become part of our
criminal population. The wonder is that any attain to good citizenship,
as not a few have done.


THE WAY THEY LIVE,

and the things they do, are matters which most people know but little
about, and seem to care still less. Most of them start out as newsboys,
bootblacks, or both combined. Those who don’t turn out to be thieves and
“toughs” learn trades, and sometimes develop into shrewd and successful
business men. Let me tell you about the doings of some of the street
arabs of Toronto that I have known. Their names I won’t mention, though
I have them all before me, because I hope to see some of them occupying
a better position in life one of these days. In that case it wouldn’t be
agreeable to them, perhaps, to have somebody turn up the files of THE
NEWS and remind them of the adventures of their boyhood.

First I will tell you about the good boys I have known, for as I have
said, in spite of their poverty they are not all bad.

About fourteen years ago one of the best bookbinders in England emigrated
to Canada with his wife and little boy. They settled in Toronto. Shortly
afterwards the man commenced to drink. His wife soon followed his
example. They both went down the hill rapidly. Finally they drifted
into prison, and their little boy was left to shift for himself. He
experienced hard lines for a long time. Like the sparrows, he got his
food wherever he could find a crumb, and slept under a crossing, in an
empty packing-box, or elsewhere as fortune might decide. When a reverend
gentleman, who had known his parents under better circumstances, took an
interest in the lad’s welfare, and went in search of him, he found him


IN A MISERABLE HOVEL

in St. John’s ward. His fellow-occupants were lying in the worst stages
of scarlet fever, and had he been allowed to remain longer with them, he
would probably soon have been beyond the need of his friend’s assistance.
The gentleman procured lodgings for him, and started him in business as a
newsboy. He continued nearly two years in the business, and then obtained
a situation which he still holds. His father died in Toronto jail and his
mother in the General hospital.

A little fellow, whom I know very well, was thrown upon his own resources
by reason of his parents quarreling, and afterwards separating and
breaking up their home. He got a job in a well-known Toronto shoe
factory at $2 per week. In the middle of summer business became dull,
and all hands were given a month’s holiday. Now there were things that
Jimmy needed far more than a month’s holiday, namely, shelter, food,
and clothes. He saw that something must be done. He bought a stock of
newspapers, and went to work to sell them. His bright face and industry
brought him success. At the end of the month he had paid his way and
saved $27. He sent a $5 bill to his mother, who was in the country, to
come home. When she came back he gave her the balance of his money to
furnish a couple of rooms. Soon after she was reconciled to her husband,
the boy went back home to live, and ever since harmony has reigned in the
household.

I am sorry that there are not more examples of this kind and less of
those which follow.


TIM AND SAM.

    “For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,
    The Toronto young vag is peculiar.”

Wee Tim Mc⸺ and his pal, Sam W⸺, are aptly described by the above
couplet. They are the best known of any of the hundreds of young urchins
who pick up a living on our streets. Though scarcely more than 10 years
old, they have had a short residence in every charitable institution
in the city. In every case their evil genius tempted them to say and
do things which could not be tolerated by the managers, and they were
dismissed. Now they would find it impossible to get admittance to any of
the places mentioned, even if they so desired, which they don’t. Time has
hardened them. During the latter part of the winter just closed Little
Tim was a frequent applicant for shelter at one or other of the police
stations. One night, between 11 and 12 o’clock, a policeman’s attention
was attracted by a child’s sobs. A search in the darkness revealed Little
Tim lying under a street crossing, without coat or shoes, and shivering
from the cold. His association with the officers of the law and the
police cells has stripped them of their terrors. He no longer trembles
with fear at the sight of them, and the power which once deterred him
from wrong-doing has but little influence upon his conduct. He does not
hesitate, when opportunity offers, to appropriate


WHAT DOES NOT BELONG TO HIM.

Several times he has had interviews with the Police Magistrate on account
of such offences. In almost every instance, his tender years and pitiful
face procured for him immunity from punishment, but it is doubtful if he
will be able to evade justice much longer. Little Sam, his bosom friend,
and the sharer of his adventures, has a home to go to, but he prefers
to be a rover. His forte is begging, at which he is very successful.
His method is to hang around the doors of the principal restaurants
and coffee houses. When he sees someone approach that he thinks he can
deceive, he instantly begins to sob as though his heart were breaking.
The unsuspecting and kind-hearted stranger stops and enquires what his
trouble is. He replies, as he vainly attempts to stifle his sobs, that
he hasn’t had any breakfast, doesn’t know where he can get any, and is
all broken up with hunger. A dime, or sometimes a quarter, rewards his
stratagem, and he goes around the corner to laugh in his sleeve at the
clever fraud he has perpetrated. Not long ago Sammy’s career was near
being closed up in a rather peculiar manner. He had stopped out late,
and knew it was useless to go home, so he crawled into a half-filled ash
barrel, and was soon sound asleep. Presently a couple of scavengers came
along and dumped the barrel upside down into their wagon. Poor little


SAM WAS WELL NIGH SMOTHERED

before the scavengers became aware of his presence and extricated him
from his uncomfortable position. It is said that since that little
adventure he prefers a packing box or the shelter of a street crossing to
anything in the shape of a barrel. Sammy’s confidence in his pal seems to
have weakened of late, judging from a remark which he made to the Police
Magistrate the other day. He said: “When I’ve got money Tim sticks to me,
but when I haven’t he tells me to go to the d—l.”

Last September eight boys belonging to the Newsboys’ lodging became
imbued with the ideas of Tom Sawyer. They pooled their spare cash,
hired a sail-boat, and made the voyage to the island. While there a
storm arose, and they were afraid to attempt the return trip, so they
erected a temporary shelter, and camped out over night. The next day they
reached home, half-frozen, their clothes soaked with the rain which had
poured down upon them during the night. The ring-leaders were sharply
reprimanded for their conduct. In consequence of this they left the
institution, and prevailed upon about twenty of the other boys to follow
their example. For a couple of months afterwards, the boys slept in the
old bolt works building on the Esplanade. The hardships and exposure
which they underwent told heavily upon them. One returned to the lodging
with a severe cold, which clung to him and


ENDED IN HIS DEATH

a few weeks ago. Another lies suffering in the hospital at the present
time from the same cause. In spite of all this, many of these boys prefer
to sleep on the street rather than be subjected to any restraint.

Some of them have a roving disposition, and take periodical excursions
to other cities in Canada and the United States. I know some who have
more than once visited Chicago. One boy’s father told me that he came
from England to Canada simply because in the Old Country he found it
impossible to keep his thirteen-year-old son at home. The lad hadn’t been
long in Toronto before he ran away, got aboard the train, and stole away
to Montreal, from there he went to Quebec, and thence to Chicago. His
father is now living in the neighborhood of Lambton Mills. He doesn’t
know where his truant boy is, and has given up all hope of ever getting
him back home again.

I could go on for an indefinite length of time, giving incidents in
the lives of Toronto street arabs. The examples I have cited will
be sufficient, however, to enlighten those who have never troubled
themselves to inquire into the circumstances of these children of
adversity to whom the lines have not fallen in pleasant places.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE HOSPITAL.


That a good deal of the ailing and suffering endured by humanity is
superinduced by vicious habits of one kind or another is a pretty well
ascertained fact. The staff of the General hospital could inform you that
many of the “cases” who pass through their hands owe their debilitated
or broken frames to excess or neglect of one kind or another. The General
hospital, therefore, is, as well as the jail, an institution which the
battered and enfeebled sinner resorts to when he can no longer stand up
against the world’s buffets. You will find them there, the children of
slothfulness and inebriety. Charity refuses to condemn them for faults
which have their root in that weakness which is to a greater or lesser
degree inherent in our common humanity. She has declared that their
wounds must be healed, their quivering nerves steadied and their wasting
vitality in general restored. This is done at the general hospital
without money and without price. As many as are able to pay their way do
so, but lack of this world’s goods does not preclude ailing mortality
from shelter, food, medicine and healing.

The fretfulness of people who are ailing is well known, and every once in
a while one hears of


COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE MANAGEMENT

of the hospital, either privately poured into a friendly ear or more
publicly expressed in the daily papers. All of our public institutions
are subject from time to time to this sort of criticism, and perhaps it
does no harm, although doubtless it is galling to those officials, many
of whom labor hard and long to render their establishments as perfect as
possible. But perfection eludes the sons of men, and an approximation
to it is all that can be looked for, even in what is called a “model
establishment.” No doubt the medical superintendent at the hospital
has many difficulties to contend against, and if he might speak out in
meeting and let the people know what they are, more sympathy and credit
would perhaps be awarded him.

At night the hospital looks like a building illuminated on a gala day.
From each of its many scores of windows a beam of light cleaves the night
shadows. If you cross the portal at this hour the first person you are
likely to meet is a kindly-faced woman in a coquettish spotless muslin
cap, plainly dressed, with that pure complexion which very generally
distinguishes women who are much indoors and whose health is good. This
is one of the night nurses. She might stand for a picture of the Goddess
Hygeia—with modern trappings. One would half forgive fate for making
him sick to be tended by such an embodiment of “sweetness and light.”
All must agree with the opinion that it is a great point to have the
attendants on the sick, persons whom it is pleasant for the eye to rest
upon.

This young woman whom I have been speaking of goes up stairs and
noiselessly glides down a ward. She carries a lantern, whose soft light,
however, does not wake even the lightest sleeper. She passes two or three
of the little cots, and at length arrives at one where


AN OLD MAN LIES.

He has a white bandage about his chin. She scrutinizes his features,
and then passes on. Her last instructions before going on was to keep
a watchful eye on this old man. He is a farmer, and a few days ago
he was admitted to the hospital suffering from cancer. A great bunch
of the devouring ulcer was seated on his left jaw. After examination
and consultation among themselves the doctors told him that if it was
allowed to remain there he must die; if, on the other hand, an operation
was performed, he might live. They asked him to choose. He chose the
operation. His vitality was low, and the surgeons knew that the chances
were greatly against their utmost skill. They do not like a case like
this. The probability is so great that the operation will merely hasten
death, that it is an unpleasant one. Medicine is of no avail in this
case. He is fed entirely on a milk and spoon diet. The operation was
performed yesterday afternoon. After the old man recovered from the
ether he lay in a state of stupor, breathing hard. In the evening the
doctor saw him and shook his head, and then gave the night nurse explicit
instructions regarding him.

The gas in the ward is turned down to a blue spark. Everything is very
still. Not even a snore is heard. Snoring is generally the result of
gross and heavy feeding, and the jaded appetite of the sick helps them
to avoid gormandizing. Every five or ten minutes the nurse leaves her
chair in the corridor and passes down the ward with her little lantern.
Sometimes she gently awakes a patient to apply a poultice or cooling
lotion. She always looks at the old man. At length she makes a longer
pause and seems


DISTURBED BY WHAT SHE SEES.

The old man is breathing stertorously. Half of the eye-balls are hidden
under the upper eyelids—the whites are turned up, and make a ghastly
continuation to the white bandage round the chin. The nurse moves hastily
away and summons one of the assistant physicians. Everybody else in the
great still room is asleep, and in its pale light no token is given of
the presence of the angel of death, but before the physician’s return the
dread work is done, and the old man’s troubled spirit has passed into the
land of shadows. The calling of the date was merely a matter of form.
Everything is done quietly. No one is wakened. A screen is put about the
little cot. Two stout men are summoned from below. The corpse is pinned
up and carried away through the silent ward.




CHAPTER XXX.

PIECES OF MEN.


The convalescent patients at the hospital are not only permitted, but
encouraged, to take full advantage of the two greatest remedies in
nature’s pharmacœpea, fresh air and exercise. On the west side of the
main building, a long, substantially built stairway leads from the
various wards to the recreation grounds below. Here are planted trees,
grass in abundance, and benches here and there for the double purpose
of rest and shade. A little north of the center building and the fever
hospital is the convalescent-room, a large, airy building, furnished
inside with lounges, tables, chairs and the appurtenances for such
simple games as draughts and dominoes. The upper story is devoted to
the use of female patients. On fine days, however, the majority of the
inmates prefer a pipe outside. Although many of them are destitute of
funds, few appear to suffer from want of the magic weed. There is a sort
of freemasonry among smokers, and the stingiest of men has scarcely
the heart to refuse an occasional handful of tobacco to his more needy
fellow-sufferer. And how some of the poor battered wrecks enjoy the
luxury, even though the pipe be a short and rank dhudeen, and its
contents the dryest and most bitter of five-cent plug!

That man in the blue coat, reaching nearly to his knees, is a notable
example. He is


THIN AND HAGGARD,

and his ghost-like aspect is heightened by the sleeves pinned up at the
shoulders of his dilapidated garment. If you ask him, he will tell you
he has not six inches of arms to his whole body. He was knocked down by
an engine some months ago while he was intoxicated. He fell length-wise,
with an arm extended over each rail. To him the pleasure of an occasional
pipe is perhaps enhanced by the difficulty which attends the obtaining of
it. It is quite a little study to watch how the poor devil goes about the
process. Some kindly patient, acceding to his request for a match, places
one between his lips. The maimed man hops joyfully off to a second,
whom he has noticed to be the possessor of a fine T. &. B. plug, almost
intact. Somebody fishes the suppliant’s pipe out of his pocket, fills it
with the crumbled ’baccy, and, less fastidious than most readers would
care to be, places the dirty stem in his own mouth, and with a few sturdy
puffs, sets the contents glowing bravely. And now the armless man, his
cutty fairly inserted in his lips, stalks off to an adjacent seat, secure
of happiness for at least one sunny half-hour. Perhaps, mutilated as he
is, and past sharing in what most men deem the active enjoyments of life,
his mind is more at ease now than it has been for many a day. His eye has
lost the old


FURTIVE LOOK OF THE TRAMP,

who never dared to strengthen his supplications by a straightforward
gaze; he is no longer a wanderer and homeless vagrant on the face of an
earth whose spring-time blossoms had no message for him or his kind.
He has forgotten already the cold nights passed in the streets or in
the parks; the questionable benefit of a troubled sleep in some frowsy
ten-cent lodging-house; the pitiful struggle, reversed day after day, to
obtain enough food to keep soul and body together. For the rest of his
life he doubtless counts on being beyond the reach of actual want. He
will be cared for by some of our benevolent societies and received into
some charitable institution where the balance of his chequered life will
be quietly spent, undisturbed by thoughts of a past which had nothing in
it worthy of regret.

That man on the veranda is an old soldier. Like most of his class, he
delights in nothing so much as to gather around him a little crowd of
patient and interested listeners. He still cherishes a fine


CONTEMPT FOR CIVILIANS,

slightly modified by the present exigencies of his condition, which
involves certain obligations to the despised class, in the way of tobacco
and such like minor accommodations. He has been in India, Afghanistan,
Abyssinia, Zululand, and last, but not least, the Curragh of Kildare.
Curiously enough, it is of this last that his reminiscences are most
lively, and its recollections are evidently cherished more lovingly than
those of foreign lands. If he tells you anything about these last, you
need not hope to hear much of unfamiliar customs, of strange sights, of
hair-breadth ’scapes; your old soldier is seldom a great observer or
a graphic reciter of stirring events. Barrack-room pranks, guard-room
escapades, and long dialogues with officers, in which the narrator
invariably comes out ahead, are the staple of his talk. His wooden leg
does not seem to cause him a moment’s trouble, and he tilts it up on an
adjacent chair as jauntily as if it were a souvenir of Isandhula, instead
of a legacy from a drunken brawl in front of a Lombard street shanty. It
is to be feared that this ancient warrior is a bit of a fraud; but he is
such a light-hearted, garrulous, transparently mendacious old party that
one is not inclined to be too hard on his shortcomings.

This old man whom you saw move into a chair a minute ago is suffering
from no specific disease. Behind the tightly drawn skin can be plainly
discerned the lineaments of the fleshless skull. As he sits his eyes
are the only features that save the face from being a perfect likeness
of that of a corpse. When he moved to this seat his movements reminded
you of a very jerky automaton, so stiff were his limbs and so wooden his
body. I do not know one fact about the history of this old fellow in his
shabby garments, but certain I am that if it were skilfully treated there
would be


MORE LESSONS TO BE DERIVED

from it than from any one of the numerous “lives” of great men which
flood the book stores. “Failure” is written in every wrinkle of his
clumsy clothing and in the sad lines of his face. It seems to me that the
life history of such a failure would be as interesting as the details of
a career of one whose whole life might be summed up in the word success.
But the particulars of the existence of such men are buried with their
bodies in the odd corner of a churchyard, and we can only guess at the
foolishness, the blunders and the sins which have withered this man’s
life. As I said before, this specimen of hospital flotsam and jetsam is
suffering from no particular or specific disease, and there are a dozen
around these grounds of which the same could be said. They bear about a
blighted vitality which the romance-writers call a broken heart.

But we are looking merely at the sad side of the convalescent. There are
many happy little scenes to be seen about. Men who have long lain on
beds of pain, who for the first time in months have wandered out under
the summer sky and sniffed the strong odor of the budding trees and
blooming flowers. One almost envies these fellows the superior beauties
they perceive in nature’s show. Others are being visited by friends and
talking hopefully of going out soon and resuming their places amongst the
toiling sons of men.




CHAPTER XXXI.

INFANT WAIFS.


Below the glittering surface of our beautiful civilization, drifting
in the silent undertide is a current of guilt, injustice, and despair
that has no voice to proclaim its misery. But its contagion affects the
highest crest of the uplifted wave. The beings who dwell in these sunless
depths of ignorance have been reached by no humanizing influences, and
when events drive them into companionships that are new, with their
imperfectly developed natures, the results cannot be otherwise than
disastrous. It is from such conditions as these that the majority of our
“unfortunates” and criminals come, and all the philosophic sentimentalism
of the age cannot render a better account for them. With no means, so
far known in this beneficent age, of staying this mighty current, the
victims must be waited for near the bank of the whirlpool into which
they are sooner or later destined to plunge in their mad career. For
this kindly helpful purpose houses of reception, lying-in hospitals, and
infant asylums are built and supported by civic and national governments,
and benevolent, tender hearted men and women, of high social standing,
give their time and attention to the management and direction of these
institutions.

The infant asylums and houses of refuge in Toronto are many, and the
most important ones are large and commodious. From the windows of one of
these fall the softest, mellowest light, for lamps are shaded and turned
low so as not to disturb the innocent sleepers. There are sixty children
in the house all less than two years old. Some are in the arms of their
mothers, some are in charge of some other unfortunate, and others lie in
their little cots alone. Here is one resting as balmily as if the angel
of household love and prosperity had presided at his birth instead of the
darkness of disgrace and guilt. His cheeks are round and full and flushed
with


THE WARM ROSE HUE OF SLEEP,

delicate eyelids cover great blue eyes, and the golden lashes lie like
silken fringes on the soft face. Hair long and curling, the color of a
buttercup is tossed from a fine high forehead, and a shapely tiny hand
and rounded arm is thrust from under the cotton coverlet. He is strangely
out of keeping with his surroundings, this lovely cherub boy, for he
would grace the finest linen and silken hangings of a princely couch.
Happier still he should have formed the golden nucleus of a home about
which all the sweet domestic virtues might have bloomed.

Other little ones look curiously up with half closed eyes and drop to
sleep again, but a wide-awake small boy lifts his dull eyes towards the
matron and stretches out his weary arms for sympathy. In response the
matron bestows upon him a wooden caress that is wholly unsatisfactory to
the child. Soon the tired eyelids will have closed over all the tired
eyes, and save for an occasional small cry the dormitory is quiet for the
night, and the nurse in charge sleeps without serious interruption.

At midnight, sometimes, there is a ringing of the door-bell, a loud
peremptory clangor. The matron goes down, draws the bolts, opens, and
finds a policeman with a small parcel in his arms, or a basket in his
hand.

“Oive brought yez an addition to the family, mum,” says the man of the
baton, and he recites the street and number where the infant was found.
The child is perhaps a few days old, has the scantiest of clothing,
indeed its entire wardrobe may consist of a strip of an old woolen shawl
wrapped around and around it, and it is pretty sure to be drugged into a
stupidity from which it takes some days to recover, and many of them die
of the narcotics. And thus this silent, despairing, dumb under-current
manifests its existence to the world. The mothers of the children that
fill foundling and orphan asylums are from the most ignorant classes.
They are not of the women of the town, compared with whom they are
relatively innocent. Many of them are farm servants, and numbers of them
are immigrants unable to speak the English language. Of the mothers of
the foundlings nothing is positively known; every suspicion is founded on
conjecture. If the child is ever taken by its parents it is by adoption.

The mothers who present themselves with a child in arms, and just from
the hospital, have to pass a board of inspectors for admission to the
home. They are required to remain in the institution six months, and each


TO NURSE A MOTHERLESS ONE

beside her own or take charge of a run-about child. When the mother
goes away she usually leaves the child and pays a weekly sum for its
maintenance or makes it over to managers, who offer it for adoption.

A great many, most of the children who are taken to asylums of this
sort, become candidates for adoption. The work of disposing the waifs in
suitable homes is one of intense interest and anxious responsibility. The
adoption committee is composed, therefore, of the most efficient managers
in the board. Members of this committee come into contact with no end
of queer people and have many strange experiences to relate. The whole
business is the outcome of the criminal side of life these papers are
discussing, and as such these incidents are not incongruous here.

There are so many people and so many different sorts of people desiring
children for adoption that it requires a peculiarly shrewd faculty
and a practical knowledge of human nature to discriminate between the
worthy and the unworthy. The circumstances of all persons wishing to
adopt children are fully investigated, and references as to their
respectability must be presented and approved before a child is committed
to their care. Persons moving into new neighborhoods often intend
passing the child as their own. Strange orders are often received from a
distance—“special commissions,” as manufacturers say. The child must have
eyes of peculiar cerulean blueness, hair of a particular golden color,
fingers tapering, nails pink-tinted, toes graduated to a nicety, and the
limbs dimpled. There is not a doubt but that scores of happy new mothers
could furnish just such a wonderful babe, but this order comes to the
matron and managers of an infant asylum. A woman writes for a baby with
brown, curly hair and large dark blue eyes, and a man—but how should he
know any better?—telegraphs for a child with light curly hair, warranted
to turn dark as the child grows older—the hair, mind you. During a
year not more than three or four children with dark hair and eyes are
called for, whereas people are anxious to get blonde girls, and many
applications are made for children of that description. It looks as if it
would take a strong revolution of popular feeling to restore brunettes to
popular favor.

Certain it is, these good people would not be so fastidious if they got
up their own babies. The greater number of people who take children from
asylums are


CHILDLESS COUPLES

well on in life. A few children are adopted by widowers or widows. Some
are taken by those kind-hearted, unselfish bodies who want something
animate to love; others replace the loss of a dear little one by
installing in its stead one of these little waifs. However, there are
children enough for all whose hearts have mother love to lavish upon them.

Oftentimes the foundling asylum, in its general material capacity, is
a very angel bringing peace and good will to discontented, childless
couples, and sending happiness to distracted homes. An instance of its
good work in this mission occurred in a city not a thousand miles from
Toronto. Late one night a private carriage drove to the residence in a
fashionable portion of the city, of one of the trustees of an asylum. A
woman alighted, passed into the house, and secured an interview with the
lady trustee. The visitor gave first-class references, and by all her
outward manifestations was a person of wealth, and she looked as if she
would require the services of Sairy Gamp in a few days.

“I am fooling the whole of them,” she said, after some preliminary
explanations. “I have been married some years, and am childless, and I am
sure that my husband, who is now in Europe, will desert me on his return.
His affections are completely alienated from me.”

“But what can I do,” exclaimed the trustee.

“Let me have an infant from the asylum to pass on him as my own. I will
settle $20,000 a year on it when it comes of age.”

The trustee told the would-be mother she would look her out in the
morning and consult the other members of the committee. And the woman
departed well satisfied with the result of her visit.

Next day her statements were all verified. She was found to be in easy
circumstances, and in every way capable of taking care of a child.

So with the help of the hospital physician a pretty little girl, whose
young mother on the night of its birth said she did not care what became
of the nasty brat, was selected and the anxious mother was provided with
a baby. No one but the Hospital doctor, the lady trustee and the “mother”
knows the particulars of the dark transaction. The husband returned
and went almost wild with delight. A few months later the trustee and
the doctor were invited to visit the child. They found it lying in a
satin-lined cradle, ornamented with blue ribbon and a white dove atop of
the lace canopy.

“We are the happiest family in the world; my husband thinks there
is nothing good enough for me and that child,” is the testimony of
the foster parent. The neatest part of the deception was that her
mother-in-law was in the house when the child arrived and has never had a
suspicion of its genuineness. Here is an instance where the delusion is
practiced on the mother herself: There are mothers who lose all memory
and mind when their infants are still-born, and go immediately into a
slow fever, from which they do not recover for many months. There was
a case of this sort in one of the most palatial of our city residences
not long ago, and when it was known that the fifth child was dead, the
husband brought a child from an institution, and placed it in its stead.
The mother is transported with joy over her live child. She does not wish
to be told that the babe she loves so much is not her own. She has her
doubts, but she does not wish them confirmed.




CHAPTER XXXII.

THE PRETTY BOY.


There is a section of the young men in the city who may well be included
in the ranks of the vicious classes. A deal of their miserable little
histories is made during the hours of the night. These are the young
men who live and fatten on their families. One may have some admiration
for the brute courage of a man who takes the risk of death for the
sake of ill-gotten gains of any kind. But what respect can we have
for the thing that escapes labor by sticking like a barnacle to the
hardly-earned comforts of a home on the strength of an affection that is
all one-sided—that takes everything and gives nothing. But there is a
class of young men in the city who do this. Fellows whom you see hanging
about in the daytime, doing anything else but making an honest living,
and whom you will find at night in improper places at all hours. One has
no patience in writing about these fellows. They are the sons of men who
have to work hard to make a livelihood, but in this latter particular
the sons take good care not to imitate their sires. Probably every other
member of the family contributes to the support of the decencies and
comforts of the home except this drone, who is his mother’s darling, and
who is


TOO PRETTY TO BE SPOILED

on any mechanical work, and has not brains enough to do anything else.
He sees his sisters go out every morning to earn a pittance which they
ungrudgingly throw into the general funds at the close of each week, to
the end that this loafer may be clothed in tight pants, a diagonal jacket
and a fawn-colored overcoat, wherewith he may stand at a corner at nights
and insult other men’s sisters. One has no patience writing of this
jackanapes. He is not generally a hard drinker. If he were to get drunk
he would disarrange the sweet little love-locks that are oiled down over
his retreating forehead. His greatest ambition is to make a mash on some
indecent woman whose worst crime is her bad taste in bestowing caresses
on such a creature. If her affection is of sufficient intensity to stand
his bleeding her of her filthy gains, his joy is complete. The first use
he makes of his beauty-money is to hire a furnished room in a public
building where he plays the spider while silly young girls play the flies.

It is really extraordinary the length of time it takes for this thing
to exhaust the affection of his family. The old man generally kicks
pretty early in the game, but the barnacle simply ignores anything short
of the old man’s cowhide boots. His effrontery is amazing. Shame is a
feeling unknown to him. He is a pretty boy, and it is the duty of all his
relatives to preserve him in his pristine loveliness. He does not live in
his home. He simply uses it. It is the


ONLY PURE PLACE HE ENTERS

and it is therefore uncongenial to him. All services rendered to him
he takes as a matter of course, and as the natural homage which these
inferior creatures, his mother and sisters (mere women) should pay to
their handsome relative. He has no belief in the general purity of woman,
but hears it impugned by the scurvy canaille with whom he associates
without a chivalric blush for the gentle women at home to whom his
swinish passions would not be understood. He is too much of a coward to
commit crime and take chances of the penitentiary. When the day comes
that his indignant father will stand him no longer, and kicks him out of
doors, the choice of working, stealing, or starving is presented to him.
He may steal now, often with a view to revenging himself on the people
who have stood his disgraceful idleness so long. He will do anything that
is dirty, or mean, or unprincipled rather than work, and the eternal
justice is served when the penitentiary that fairly yearns for him scoops
him in.

The only thing that he is regular in is his meals, and he doesn’t come to
them when he can get any outsider to pay for one for him.


HE TAKES IN EVERYTHING.

He may be found at horse-races, in billiard-rooms, at cock-fights, at
street corners, at hotel doors—and everywhere he is in the way. He has
seldom any money in his pocket, and as he must have good clothes, he
spends a deal of his time endeavoring to discover tailors who don’t know
him, and who put trust in his nickel-plated promises.

This is the most pronounced type of the genus well-dressed loafer,
but there are grades. Some work a little, others work a good deal—all
spend everything they make on themselves, and exist at the expense of
hard-working fathers, mothers, or sisters.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?


The reporter makes gossip a business. He knows all the news of the
city that is published, and he knows a good deal more that is never
published. He asks you when he meets you, “Well, is there anything new?”
and expects that you will disgorge all that you have heard that day,
even if it concerns a matter that for your own interest had better not
obtain publicity. He will think you a very mean man if you conceal from
him the fact that your daughter has run away with the milkman, that you
yourself have had a quarrel with your wife because she preferred the
society of a man who carried a blue bag over his shoulder to that of her
husband, or that you are short in your accounts and intend emigrating
that night to a land of more salubrious climate than this. If you have
had the misfortune to undergo any of these unpleasantnesses, or even
others of lesser moment, the inquiring man of letters will feel utterly
disgusted and aggrieved if you refuse to let him pluck the heart out of
your mystery. If, however, you get the start of him and put the inquiry,
“anything fresh?” you have got him. He will probably betray his chagrin
by replying that the freshest thing he has seen that day is yourself, or
employ some other threadbare witticism to cover his defeat. He will do
anything but disclose to you his budget of facts. He probably has in his
notebook things that will make the hair on the scalp of the great-headed
public stand on end when his paper is issued and strewn broadcast among
the people, but no word will he breathe to you of them. He knows that you
would tell the first person you met, and thus


SET THE NEWS FLYING

until a rival journalist “got on to it.” When the news is actually made
public through his paper, he has no further interest in it. It is a
lemon that has been sucked, and has now no piquancy for him. This is his
attitude towards the information he gleans that is published, but still
more reticent is he in regard to what he does not publish. The reporter,
bit by bit, loses, like the doctor and the lawyer, his faith in human
nature. Like them he often gets glimpses in the back corners of people’s
characters, which back corners are as guiltily hidden from the eye of
man as the favorite sultana of an eastern monarch. As he goes along the
street he sees many men who know him not, but whom he knows well. He
knows of certain facts concerning them which the rest of the world knows
nothing of. He sees them in places of honor and trust, in the mart, and
in the church, and in the ball-room, and yet he knows that were those
little damaging occurrences “learned by rote and cast into his teeth,”
the trader, the deacon and the partner in the dance would shun them like
lepers and pass by on the other side. Many a reputation is saved by his
leniency. One of his commonest experiences, next to requests to put in
certain names in his paper, is requests to keep others out. Gentlemen who
have had the misfortune to appear before the Magistrate in the morning
are the most frequent attenders in reportorial rooms for this purpose.
They have first made application to the reporter in the Police court, and
he has referred them to the city editor. That gentleman generally asks,
Why should the report be mutilated for the purpose of keeping your name
out of the paper? He points out that the public pay their money for a
paper with the understanding that all the city happenings that came under


THE REPORTER’S EYE

should be found recorded therein. The fact that you were discovered at
two in the morning seated on a wood-pile, rocking a loose plank and
singing hush-a-by-baby, evidently suffering from the hallucination that
you were performing a sweet domestic duty, would be a very interesting
item to serve up for the delectation of the people who live next door
to you, and indeed to all those who know you. Now why should I rob them
of that pleasure. Then the supplicant is heard as to why. If it is a
first offence the city editor, following the Magistrate’s rule, in
all probability grants the prayer. This is the case of a man who has
substantial standing in the community. But all kinds turn up on the
same errand. A York street tough came in one day, and in a manner which
was a curious blending of promises and threats, asked to have his name
suppressed.

“You want your name kept out? Why it’s been in our paper a dozen times
for worse things than fighting. Go away boy, go away.”

“Say, nobsy, I’ve got a new girl and she’ll give me the shake if she sees
that.”

“Can’t do it sir.”

“Well, say, just make it read that I knocked the tar out o’ Mulligan will
you, and that’ll make it all right.”

Sometimes a clerk in an office or store creeks up the stairs and implores
you for God’s sake not to insert his name. He’ll lose his situation, and
when you agree to do so the gratitude that looks out of his watery eyes
is unmistakable. The poor fellow, in spending a five dollar bill on his
drunk, probably swallowed a whole week’s salary, and has been thereby
sufficiently punished. To this specimen the whole business possesses a
ghastly seriousness, but there is another class who treat it as a huge
joke. It has been noticed that men of this sort are usually Englishmen,
and their desire to have their name omitted from the Police court roster
has its rise in their fear of the ridicule of their fellows rather than
any loss of character or position in consequence of its being made public.


THESE FELLOWS WILL LAUGH

and say they have been on “a bit of a spree and got lugged by a bobby,”
and ask in an off-hand way, “keep it hout will you, mistah,” and
sometimes “mistah” does.

Not quite a hundred years ago a man came into the presence of the city
editor—tall, distinguished-looking man, clothed in the best West of
England tweed. City editor very small person compared with man. Man takes
chair offered him, and says, “I’ve got into a little scrape which you can
help me out of if you would.” City editor ought to feel flattered, that
man would condescend to use him to help him out of a scrape. But he is
very ungrateful and answers coldly: “How can I help you?”

“My wife,” says the man “is one of the most unreasonable creatures in the
world when she gets into a passion. I came home the night before last
after having done a hard day’s work in the store, and when I asked for a
little supper she started to abuse me. She said a lot of mean things. I
asked her to shut up for God’s sake, and she wouldn’t, and then, getting
a little hot I tried to stop her tongue by putting the pillow on her
head. That wouldn’t have hurt a lamb, but she struggled so that she
struck her head against the corner of the bed post and cut it. Then she
ran out on the street, and she has disgraced me. A policeman got her, and
as there was some blood on my wife’s face he arrested me. I was bailed
out immediately afterwards, but heavens, I had to appear in the court
this morning. I don’t care so much myself as for my wife and family. I
am a subscriber and advertiser in your paper, and I hope you’ll not say
anything about it.”

“Yes,” said the city editor, “I have heard something about the case. You
got home at half-past one and wanted your wife to get out of bed and cook
you a steak. Some women are very unreasonable! After your working from
ten in the morning until five at night, with only an hour for dinner! It
was a shame. If she had only thought of the long time it took you to get
home she would have had some idea how tired you were!”

“Well, sir, I didn’t come here to be made a target for your humor. Where
is the editor in chief?”

“You will find him down stairs, sir.”

But the editor was out.

He is always “out” when cowardly cattle who beat their wives are around.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE SCARLET WOMAN.


The pickpocket who steals your watch, the burglar who invades your
house in the middle of the night, or the foot-pad who knocks you down
with a sand-bag, are citizens whom it is rather unpleasant to have any
experience with, but it were better a thousand times to become the prey
of any of these hawks of the night than that of those pitiless kites—the
scarlet women of a great city. Against the thief the good burgher locks
his doors and bars his windows, but these legionaries of passion assail a
citadel where the master himself opens the gates and lets the insidious
foe enter unopposed, if not with welcome.

Every city on this continent, not to speak of other lands at all, is
afflicted with this army of iniquitous women. They form by far the
largest section of the vicious classes in every great community of
people. The evils they inflict on society, and the terrible consequences
of their manner of life to themselves, temporally and spiritually,
have constituted a theme for the moralist and a problem for the social
reformer in all lands and in all ages.

Toronto, as has been before remarked in these sketches, is not a
particularly wicked city. Few great crimes are perpetrated in our midst
and but few great criminals claim this city as their home. But the fact
that about 400 women openly live by a life of shame in this city speaks
for itself. In the day time the public promenades are liberally sprinkled
with


FLASHY FEMALES

arrayed in costly garments and costlier jewels. Beside these carrion
birds of beauteous plumage the poor man’s wife or daughter looks like a
daw. Other forms of crime skulk in the daylight, coming forth only when
the dark hours favor their calling, but these birds of prey hang out the
signs of their nefarious calling at high noon, and strut the streets
shaming the honest and demoralizing the weak. The girl who has worked
all day until brain and fingers and limbs are tired, returning homewards
at nightfall, compares her uneventful, dreary lot with the seemingly
joyous existence of these women, looks at her own shabby gown and at
their rich ones, and inwardly wonders if honesty, truth and worth are,
after all, the best. The foolish youth who returns their smiles as he
passes them on the pavement does not know that that little gloved hand is
as cruel as the tiger’s claws. That mother realized that the other day
when she heard her eighteen-year-old boy doomed to wear the disgraceful
livery of a convict. But her heartrending sobs did not ruffle a lace
on the stony front of the fair-haired, showy enchantress, to buy whose
mercenary caresses he had robbed his employer. He was a smooth-cheeked,
good-looking, clean-limbed boy, with candor marked in every line of his
face. His deeds found no record in the straightforward look of his blue
eyes. But drag him away from his mourning mother, policeman, and let him
break his spirit among the other jail-birds. Let Circe go free and entice
other boys into her toils. She didn’t know he was stealing the goods—no,
not she. Yes, let her go free, but before she goes to sleep each night
let her think of a room wherein another woman stands in


DUMB, TEARLESS AGONY,

before the picture of her son. Let there be no desire, however, to lessen
that son’s infamy who forgot a mother’s love and a sister’s devotion for
the smiles of a harlot.

“There is a great deal of soft-hearted nonsense talked about these
women of the town,” said a gentleman connected with the Society for
the Prevention of Vice. “My firm conviction is that not one in ten is
deserving of any more sympathy than we give to other criminals. People
talk about men’s brutal instincts and women’s weakness, but a long
experience and a good deal of thought on the subject has brought me
the conclusion that not one quarter of the bad women of this city have
drifted into their present lives through deceit on the part of men. What
I mean to say is that in the fall of the majority of those women they had
an equal share of sin with the men.”

“Oh, you take a cynical view of the matter. You know well the lengths to
which some men will go to accomplish their purposes. They seize some weak
point in their victim and work upon that. If they capture her affections
under promise of marriage they accomplish their purpose. If she is fond
of dress or ornaments the rich libertine captures her by rich presents.”

“You might as well excuse a thief on the same grounds. If a girl went
into a store and


STOLE A HANDSOME BONNET

or a fine pair of boots you wouldn’t pardon her, would you, because she
was fond of handsome bonnets or fine boots. In regard to being deceived
by men, I grant you that I know personally of some cases where women
have fallen through the machinations of villains—been brought to evil
by devilish, calculating, cold-blooded deceit. But I am certain that
the numbers of these in proportion to the others is very small indeed.
But even these, apart from the evil involved in their very struggle for
existence, work wickedness from the promptings of a heart which very
fast becomes hard and impressionless as marble. I tell you, if there is
any sympathy to be wasted on either, it is to be given to the victims
of these harridans. Let them once get their clutches on a man, and they
will hold him there until they have plucked him bare, and until he hasn’t
enough character left to dust a tumbler with.”

“I am afraid the discussions of your society have swamped your charity.”

“I have as much charity as most people, but what I do say is that the
social evil can’t be cured by petting and sympathy alone. Of course, in
the present condition of things, you can’t put in force those


REPRESSIVE MEASURES

which I believe to be the only way in which the evil can be permanently
lessened. You can’t start driving girls out of the houses they have to
cover them without providing some way in which they can get food and
shelter. But, sir, I am convinced that the way to cut off the supply of
recruits is to make life in a bagnio unpleasant, unprofitable, and less
seductive. Anyhow, by all means keep these flaming women off the streets.
That does more to attract light-headed, vain girls into the ranks than
any other one thing. I believe this could be done very easily. Just
intimate gently that any house whose inmates were constantly parading the
streets in their war-paint was liable to be raided, and I tell you this
promenading would stop suddenly.”

“Now, have you any clear idea how the social evil might be wiped out?”

“I don’t believe it can be wiped out while the world lasts, but what I do
believe is that if the matter were taken hold of with courage it could be
lessened and rendered less attractive to weak girls. I admit that even
this is quite a difficult thing to accomplish. You would not believe
the amount of sympathy that exists in high places for these women. You
would have to encounter and defeat all that and trample on a score of
prejudices, but the man or body of men who tackle the subject and deal
with it boldly and wisely will


SAVE MANY A GIRL

from a miserable life ending in all probability in a miserable death.
My leading thoughts about the whole business is that our kindness and
consideration for the women already ruined is cruelty to certain classes
of our females. Better be hard on the erring than be neglectful of the
influences and examples that surround those who are as yet uncorrupted.”

“What did you accomplish by the repressive measures put in force some
eighteen months ago?”

“There are others could answer that better than I can. I was out of town
for a while after the campaign was at its height. But I have been told
that the streets at least were free from the presence of the women. A
gentleman told me that he knew of three cases where keepers of houses had
abandoned the business and had been living quietly ever since. But I wish
you would see people who know more about this than I do.”




CHAPTER XXXV.

BEHOLD, THERE MET HIM A WOMAN.


The News man sought a clergyman who is well-known for his zeal and
earnest preaching, which excuses him in the eyes of many, at least, for
his somewhat heterodox views. He was asked to give his ideas with regard
to the expediency of treating such a subject as the social evil in the
public prints in the interest of morality. Without hesitation he picked
up a Bible.

“Here,” he said, “is what a greater and wiser than I has said on that
subject, and though I would not be forgiven, perhaps, if I spoke so
plainly, yet these words of the sage of Israel should command respect
and excite the people to a greater activity in repressing this terrible
social blight. Here is what we find in the 7th chapter of Proverbs:”

“For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, and beheld
among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of
understanding passing through the street near her corner. And he went the
way to her house in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark
night.

And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and
subtil of heart.

She is loud and stubborn. Her feet abide not in her house.

Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.

So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto
him, I have peace offerings with me. This day have I payed my vows.

Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I
have found thee.

I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with
fine linen of Egypt.

I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon.

Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning; let us solace
ourselves with loves.

For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.

He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day
appointed.

With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of
her lips she forced him.

He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as
a fool to the correction of the stocks. Till a dart strike through his
liver, as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his
life.

Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of
my mouth.

Let not thine heart incline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.

For she hath cast down many wounded; yea, many strong men have been slain
by her.

Her house is the way of hell, going down to the chambers of death.”

“These words were written about two thousand years ago by Solomon, the
son of David, the king of Israel. The lapse of centuries has not abated a
jot of their truth. No other part of holy writ contains plainer or more
terrible warnings than gleam from these verses. Solomon, the wisest man
of Israel, evidently did not hold with the doctrine that it is better
that these matters should be quietly ignored, let the cancer


EAT INTO SOCIETY

rather than apply the knife. It is a foul thing, therefore let it fester
and corrupt, rather than expose it to the physician’s eye. The physician
cannot eradicate altogether, therefore let him not even try to confine
its ravages. There are many who hold these views, and their opinions are
entitled to respect; and it behoves you to explain the motives by which
you are actuated and the practical purposes at which you aim in your
present inquiry. An explanation of this kind is called for inasmuch as
the subject treated of has seldom been urged upon the public attention or
exhibited in all its painful associations. This being the case it would
be no matter of wonder if in some instances your work should meet with
an unwelcome reception. The human mind, when it has long been familiar
with an existing evil, comes at last contentedly to endure, and will
even behold with a jealous eye any attempt, however well-meant, that
would threaten to overthrow it. The apathy which has been so generally
manifested regarding the social evil cannot be accounted for except on
some such principle as this. For it is a lamentable fact that while the
sympathies of the public have been awakened, their exertions drawn forth,
and their resources liberally applied in promoting other philanthropic
schemes having for their object the alleviation of human suffering and
the positive advancement of the moral and physical well-being of the
species, this mystery of iniquity, more ruinous in its tendencies and
more fearfully disastrous in its effects than any other kind of crime,
has in a great measure been overlooked.”

“Many individuals disapprove altogether of any publication of this kind
on the ground that the disclosures necessary to be made are apt to
minister to an already vitiated taste or to


FAMILIARIZE THE MINDS

of the young and inexperienced with subjects that have a tendency to
mislead or deprave them. Suppose this argument were admitted to have some
force, what, it may be asked, is to be done with a system so debasing in
its nature and so ruinous in its results? Is it better to suffer it to
go on perpetuating itself and contentedly to behold it carrying down its
thousands to a gloomy grave than to make a determined effort to resist
its progress, simply because such an effort may, perhaps, minister to
a vitiated appetite or exert a deceitful influence on the mind of some
thoughtless youth? Even on the supposition that some wretched man may
be rendered more miserable, or some hopeful youth may have his moral
principles shaken, still the evil to be remedied is of so gigantic a
nature that its arrestment would not be too dearly purchased, were
the supposed consequences necessarily connected with it. But it may,
after all, be a question whether such an idea be not visionary. Would a
disclosure that could be offered with any degree of consistency to the
public, tend to deprave still more the taste of that man who has already
abandoned himself to sensual gratifications, and who is in the daily
practice of associating with persons whose actions and habits constitute
the very essence of impurity? Or is a man who has partially gone astray,
but who still retains some sensibility of moral sentiment, likely to
make a more rapid descent when his path is seen to be strewed with the
melancholy remains of human victims? Or shall it be affirmed that a
youth—as yet uncontaminated with the vices of the world, and whose mind
has been disciplined to soundness of thinking—would experience any other
sensation than that of horror at the exhibition of human folly and guilt?

“THE NEWS” he concluded “should consider its labor well bestowed, and its
exertions amply rewarded if through its instrumentality, the public shall
be made to think more seriously and to act more vigorously in regard to a
subject which I consider of infinite moment, connected as it is with the
everlasting destiny of no inconsiderable portion of the human race.”




CHAPTER XXXVI.

KILLJOY HOUSE.


The French in their superficial way speak of a bagnio as a maison de
joie, which may be translated literally as a house of joy. It would be
impossible to conceive of a more false description of these habitations
of vice. Riotous exhilaration produced by drink there is, hideous
hysterical hilarity there is—but joy, none. The merriment of the inmates
of such a house has a commercial value, and they do not use any of it
when the men who pay for it are not about.

“I have often thought,” said a man who was connected with the city police
for some ten years, a man of great good sense and wide general reading,
“that the people who speak in condemnation of the social evil do not
dwell sufficiently on the actual revolting facts connected with the life
of a woman of the town. I have read sensational newspaper articles, and
I have heard preachers’ sermons on the subject, but in all there is a
lack of practical treatment. After you have read or heard them, a person
who does not know the facts would think that a house of ill-fame was
the abode of wicked and unholy but yet picturesque passion. In spite of
themselves they succeed in surrounding the unsavory mess with a halo
of romance, than which there could be nothing further from the facts.
There is no romance in the lives of evil women. Everything about them is
gross, sordid and mercenary. The master passion of their lives is not
sensuality, but a greed for money and display conjoined with envy and
all uncharitableness. They are the slaves of the vile women who keep the
houses in which they live. While they are new to the life, pretty and
popular, they are allowed certain latitude. These are the ones whom you
see parading the streets, sitting in the houses of entertainment, and
driving to the races. But when


THEIR WITHERING LIVES

begin to tell upon their good looks, their days of merriment are over.
They now become slaves in the vilest sense of the word. The money for
which they sell their souls is the constant prey of the hoary old
brothel-keeper to whom they are in bondage. The majority of the men who
visit their dens are in liquor. Is there anything picturesque about
half-a-dozen dull-eyed creatures being roused out of their sleep in the
small hours of the morning to be marshalled before an old brute with
rum-laden breath and filthy person whose sottish fancy has led him here?
Is it possible to conceive a woman with a single vestige of pride left
consenting to be at the pick and choose of such a loathsome creature? Yet
this is a frequent sight in these houses of hell. Is there any romance
about that? And when the choice is made the other five are eaten with
envy. But it is envy, spitefulness, and all uncharitableness, morning,
noon and night with them. The demon of hatred is the presiding spirit
of their sunless habitations. She who has good looks and youth is a
continual eyesore to the woman whose lustre of girlhood is a thing now of
memory. She is hated and slandered, and she glories in the fact because
it is a tribute to qualities which she has that they have not. But her
hour comes too soon and too surely, and a younger rival hurries her down
the slope, to be herself displaced in turn as the months go by, leaving
their impress of dissipation.

Envy and hatred of each other are common characteristics, and the same
may be said of lying, intemperance and profanity. Lying is part of their
trade, and is a necessity of their existence, and so much of a habit does
the practice become that they


LIE BY PREFERENCE.

If the truth were equally profitable, they would lie by choice. I have
often heard them relate the stories of their lives to officers of
charities or prisons, and in almost all cases the statements were wildly
improbable. One of them spoke of being of good family and having been
educated in a convent, when it was discovered that she could neither
read nor write. The story of their downfall, as told by themselves, is
always attributed to being the result of loving not wisely, but too well.
In many cases I have heard this claim made, when the men in the force
knew the whole history of the dame, and knew her representations to be
absurdly false.”

“Well, you don’t mean to say that in your experience you haven’t met
women who owed their downfall to the seductive wiles of men.”

“I am only speaking of these women in the aggregate, and giving you their
general characteristics. I look upon them all as unfortunate, and some
more so than others. Some deserve the description of unfortunates in
the same degree as the burglars and thieves in the prisons do. Others
undoubtedly are led into the life by a cruel fate. Indeed I know of such
a case. Five years ago there lived near me a family, consisting of a
husband and wife, and a son and daughter. The husband was a useless old
moke, who didn’t even have energy enough to get drunk, but his wife had,
and did. The boy, who was the eldest of the two children, was a rough,
and got into a fight aboard an excursion boat, and came near killing a
man. He fled to the States, and as far as I know has never been heard
of in this city since. Mary was the only one of the family for whom the
neighbors had any respect. She was a shy girl and seemed to


KNOW NOTHING BUT TO WORK

away at an old sewing machine, making overalls for a factory. Any time
that Mary was seen outdoors was carrying great big bundles wrapped in a
brown piece of linen, which she brought back full of work, and was seen
no more till that dole of labor was completed. The neighbors tolerated
the family on Mary’s account. Mary’s dress was about as uninteresting as
the brown lining which invariably encircled her work, but those who look
for beauty unadorned saw in her dark eyes and delicate complexion things
that were pleasant to look upon. But the chief glory of humble little
Mary was her brown hair, which fairly flowed in a cataract down her back.
She was very much ashamed of these unruly locks, and when she went abroad
they were tucked away in as small a knot as they could be squeezed into
at the back of her head. But people caught glimpses of them at odd times,
and the fame of Mary’s ringlets spread abroad on the street.

Suddenly there came a change in her ways. She commenced to exhibit some
coquetry in dress. But I need not weary you with the details of her
decline and fall. Suffice it to say that Mary was missed from home one
day and her mother bewailed in her cups that her daughter had gone to the
bad.

One night I was standing in the shadow of a lamp on Elizabeth street
when a woman came along. I knew Mary and stopped her. She exhibited
great fear and shame-facedness but I talked to her and finally gained
her confidence. She was very anxious to know what the neighbors thought
of her. “They are very sorry that you have forgot yourself, Mary,” I
answered. “I had to do it,” she said. I tried to reach the meaning of
this answer but it was only after a long time that she told me her story.
She told in a singularly simple and feeling way


HER STORY.

“I am awfully sorry Mr. ⸺ for what has happened, but I couldn’t help it.
My feelings were stronger than myself. There was something happened one
day that changed all my life. You remember the bundles I used to carry.
Well, one day, when I was on my way home it started to rain, and before
I went two blocks I was soaking. Just then a car overtook me, and I
hailed it. I was never on a car before, but I had money that I had just
got from my boss, and I thought I could afford it. I struggled into the
car with my wet bundle. There were six ladies and three gentlemen in
the car. There was plenty of room for me on either side if they had sat
closer, but not one of them moved. I stood there like a fool till one of
the gentlemen at the far end of the car stood up and asked me to take his
seat. When I went to sit down, the lady who had sat close enough to him,
drew as far away from me as possible. I never before felt what a dowdy
ill-dressed thing I was, but I thought so then. My face was crimson, and
I could not look up for the world. Oh, how I wished I had never got on
that car. It became unbearable at length, and I made a foolish attempt
to get off the car before ringing the bell, and I fell on one of the
ladies, and she was very indignant. The gentleman who had given me his
seat picked up my bundle and carried it out, while I slunk out after him
wishing that the earth would swallow me. He carried my bundle to the
sidewalk and asked me which way I was going. I told him, and then when he
found I had got off the car long before I was near my home, he laughed at
me, and joked about the way the old cats (that’s what he called them) had
treated me. That adventure was the


TURNING POINT OF MY LIFE.

That man’s appearance and voice and smile have haunted me to my ruin.
I thought him a god, and when I considered that he took my part before
all those ladies I would willingly have let him tramp on me or kill me.
A blow from that man would have been sweeter a thousand times than
the smiles of another. He did not lose sight of me. I could refuse him
nothing and he was but too ready to use his power over me. What is the
use of talking. You see what I am.

“Now, sir,” continued my friend “the man who ruined this girl is what I
call a professional masher. He still exists to ply his arts. That was as
fine a girl as ever lived, and she was led away by her better instincts,
either love or gratitude, I don’t exactly know which. But I think this is
an exceptional case. The great majority go astray from pure cussedness.
Love of dress, indolence, licentiousness, and bad temper will be found
to have more to do with the propagation of the social evil than man’s
perfidy and woman’s weakness.”

“Your views are very like those of another gentleman I interviewed—all in
favor of the men.”

“I haven’t said a word in favor of the men. I loathe the men who consort
with these women, especially the married portion of them. When I was
a policeman I became acquainted with the dirty habits of many of this
class, and I felt so angry with them that when I would meet them going
along the street during the day with their sanctimonious faces I would
feel like slapping them. No, sir; I don’t defend the men, but neither do
I want to see the woman held blameless when she deliberately chooses this
life, and by her example corrupts and entraps others. But I started out
to talk about the grossness of life in a bagnio, and here I have been
telling stories, but that’s your own fault in interrupting me. I was
looking for a thief one night when I was acting-detective. I found out
where his “woman” lived, and I felt sure the way to catch him was to


WATCH WHERE SHE LIVED.

The house was neither first nor second-class, but a compromise between
the two. It got very cold, and after loitering about for an hour, and
getting chilled to the bone, I concluded I could watch inside as well
as out. My only fear was that some of the inmates would recognize who I
was. I took chances, however, and rang the bell. I was admitted without
much trouble. I found that the greater number of the inmates of the house
were much under the influence of liquor. There were three men in the room
into which I was shown. Each had a woman seated on his knee. Three more
came tripping down stairs, the first of whom threw herself into my lap
and encircled my neck with her arms. I cannot say her attentions were
appreciated. A sickening odor of stale beer permeated her person, and
she was decidedly drunk. The other two who had come down stairs with her
were not so bad, but they were evidently inclined to be sarcastic about
the suddenness of her attack on me. They evidently thought she should
have given me a chance to make my pick. I was anxious to find out which
was the “woman” of the man I was in search of, and when the nymph who
occupied my knee asked me to buy a bottle of beer I complied, the more
willingly as it relieved me of her unpleasant bulk and


ODORIFEROUS BREATHINGS.

The beer was brought and I was assessed $1 for it. During its consumption
I discovered the woman I wanted. A very brief conversation with her
showed me that she was expecting some other society than mine that
evening. “Don’t be making up to me,” she said. “I expect a ‘friend,’ and
the landlady would raise Cain if I threw business for him.”

I felt pretty certain that my thief would show up shortly. By this time
the drunkest of the three who had come down stairs on my entrance, was
quarreling with the others and threatening all sorts of dire disasters.
The profanity and sewer-talk was something frightful. At last one of them
struck her with a glass, and in a moment there was a frightful commotion.
There was no fight in the poor, drunken creature, and the sight of the
blood which flowed from her brow frightened her into maudlin tears. She
sat on the floor, while the blood dabbled her white night-dress, and
rocked back and fore, moaning “Cora, I didn’t think you’d stab me.”

After this incident, although I saw no more drinking in the room, I
observed that each time they re-appeared they were all getting drunker
and drunker. The landlady of the house, a coarse, scowling woman, tried
to keep them quiet, but they sang snatches of song, and swore, and
quarreled, and blows were ever and anon freely interchanged. It was a
scene I can neither describe nor forget, and I was overjoyed in more ways
than one when I saw Pearl, who was the only one who was anyways sober,
go to the door and return with my man. I had the handcuffs on him before
he recovered from his surprise. When it was known that an arrest had
been made in the house, there was a great hubbub. Women rushed here and
there like demented things, and I took advantage of this consternation
to slip out with my prisoner. Again, I say, that there is not one tinge
of romance, sentiment or any other ennobling thing about the lives of
evil women. There is no passion, not even sensuality on the part of the
woman, nothing but a dirty account of bargain and sale, that one of the
parties to the transaction may compound with a rapacious brothel-keeper
for her lodgings and semi-occasional meals.”

With this remark my friend moved away.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

LEADING DOWN TO DEATH.


It is seldom possible to watch the whole career of an abandoned woman.
As they step lower and lower in abasement they keep moving from city to
city until they reach a stage where the next descent must be into the
grave. It is, therefore, difficult to trace their progress, from the
“high-toned” fast house to the hospital pallet where they finish a life
of loathsomeness by a still more loathsome death.

It has been calculated that the average span of existence for a woman who
embraces a life of shame does not average more than five or six years.
A year of the irregular life suffices to seriously impair that youth
and their good looks, and then they begin to experience the bitterness
and the hatefulness of the terrible trade which they have launched
themselves. The extravagance and improvidence of their natures soon put
them completely in the power of the soulless harridan who keeps the
house. She contrives that they shall always be owing her money. She has
good security in their wardrobes, and their lives from this time out
become one long struggle with debt, hatred of the landlady who oppresses
them, ill-health, and disease.

Information derived from many quarters shows with unmistakeable
distinctness


THE AWFUL PUNISHMENTS

which follow hard upon the heels of the sin of unchastity. Interviews
with medical men set forth a state of affairs the recital of which
beggars language to give it due utterance. All that is horrible in human
misery and possible in physical debility and degradation visits the
bodies of these poor outcasts of the earth.

“When I was a young man,” said a physician to the writer, “I used to
think that if a woman who had just taken her first step in infamy were
to visit certain of the wards in the great hospitals and see the masses
of living putrescence, which were once fair women, who are there rotting
away on their last couches, the sight would serve to drive them back
into the paths of rectitude and virtue, though all other argument on
earth would fail to do so. Doctors get used to terrible sights, but
the venereal ward of an hospital never ceases to shock and disgust.
No amount of use can make the physician on each recurring visit less
sensible of the overwhelming calamity that has overtaken these hapless
victims of brutal lust.”

So certain are these terrible consequences to ensue on a life of shame,
that women of this class seldom put in a year of the life without
contracting one or other of the dreadful diseases which afflict and
pursue them to the grave. Their time is spent between the bagnio and the
hospital, and each recurrence of their disorders makes them more and more
whited sepulchres, moving like an incarnate plague, dealing out poisoned
contamination to their guilty male associates, a contamination that
confirm in a striking way the terrible dictum of scripture, that the sins
of the father shall be visited on the children unto the third and fourth
generation. Verily “Her house is the way of hell, leading down to the
chambers of death.”

No matter what opinion may be entertained with regard to the proper
methods of


LESSENING THE EVILS OF PROSTITUTION

it is impossible to witness the downward course of its victims without
regret and pity. Even in cases where the life has been chosen with the
utmost deliberation from the worst of motives, it is but natural that
the condign punishment that surely awaits the modern Magdalen should
awaken our sympathy, and kindle in the philanthropic mind a desire to
turn out of the road of such calamity the erring feet of wilful women.
It is not the purpose of these sketches to preach. The aim has been
merely to point out what exists in our midst, and leave public opinion in
its aggregate wisdom to settle the problems which these facts present.
Every right-thinking person must sympathize with the efforts that
Christian men and women make to rescue this class from their lives of
sin. The legislators of the province in establishing the Mercer prison,
dealt with the question both in a penal and reformatory spirit. Other
lesser institutions have been founded by philanthropic persons entirely
reformatory and helpful in their character. Of this nature are the
Magdalen asylum and the Haven. Both of these undoubtedly do commendable
work. The percentage of reformations effected is certainly small, but
small as it is it encourages the willing workers to go on. Their chief
endeavors should be directed towards eradicating from public sentiment
the feeling that the woman who loses her honor


CAN NEVER CLIMB BACK

into respectability and forgiveness again.

This is the philanthropic aspect of the base. But it has another. It has
its criminal aspect.

County Crown Attorney Fenton, who is the secretary of the Society for the
Prevention of Vice, was asked what his society was doing in regard to the
social evil.

“The society,” he said, “is in statu quo at present. The gentlemen who
compose it did what they could and got a great deal of help from the
police commissioners but they could not get Major Draper into their
way of thinking. Letters passed between the chief and me but nothing
ever came of it. My last letter requested him to give me a list of the
houses known to the police to be houses of ill fame, but this he refused
to do on the ground that he did not know what use I was to make of the
information.”

Here Mr. Fenton laughed very heartily.

“What were the plans of the society for the eradication of the evil?”

“I don’t think the society had any hope of wiping out the evil. All they
hoped to do was to keep it in check. I know that my views were simply
these. The law of the land declares that keeping a house of ill-fame, or
being an inmate thereof, are offences punishable by


FINE AND IMPRISONMENT.

The chief constable and all his men are sworn to enforce the laws of the
land, and I proposed they should do so in this particular class of cases.”

“There were some raids made about that time. What were the results of
them?”

“Well, during the discussion of the question large numbers of the women
took fright, and they left the city in droves. Quite a number were
arrested when the raids were made, and a few sent to the Mercer, and more
fined. Two or three keepers were frightened out of the business.”

“Didn’t the girls disappear off the public streets at that time?”

“Yes; I am told they did.”

“But are they not now as bold and as numerous as ever there?”

“I really couldn’t say. The society may give the subject its serious
attention soon, and if it does, I’ll endeavor to make it as hot for these
‘high-toned’ houses as for the more miserable ones.”

The reporter could have told him that the public promenades are thronged
these days with females exhibiting the richest fabrics which the shops
afford.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

ANOTHER CLASS OF PROMENADERS.


In another of these sketches I have spoken of certain members of the
female sex who spend the most of their evenings in promenading the
streets. They are young and full of lusty life. I come now to another
class of promenaders—the saddest class of all God’s creatures—hopeless,
heartless. It is almost impossible to avoid sermonizing in dealing with
this sisterhood of sin. They are treated enough to words of opprobrium
and hate. Let them be spoken of here rather in pity than in anger, and
when the awful lessons of their sins are ascertained and pointed out, let
them sink into the obscurity out of which neither law, love, nor mercy
seems sufficient to lift them.

“Good evening,” said a woman to me one night as I was going to the
Parliament buildings. The voice was harsh and hoarse. She passed as close
to me as possible, but her tone implied that she would not be surprised
if she got no answer. I was not in a hurry and I stopped.

“Do you want to see me?” I said.

She exhibited some signs of fear now. Probably she thought I was one of
the brigade of the famous police mashers.

“No, I guess not,” was the answer, as she peered inquiringly at me. “I
was feeling lonesome and I just passed the time o’ day.”

“Feeling lonesome, eh; what makes you lonesome?”

“I’m lonesome because my fellah doesn’t come along.”

“Don’t you feel cold?”

“A little chilly; but I know where we can be warm.”

Ghastly humor! The little laugh with which it was accompanied raised


A FIT OF COUGHING,

which she vainly tried to control. It shook her shivering frame beneath
the flimsy rags until she staggered on the sidewalk.

After the paroxysm had subsided I said, “That’s a bad cough you have.
Have you had it long?”

“Oh, no; I am as strong and good as ever I was. I got a little cold the
other night,” she said, as she placed her hand upon her thin breast in a
vain endeavor to check another outburst.

If she had only known. That cough would prove a better extractor of coin
from men’s pockets than the disgusting arts of her wretched trade. Her
physical frailties would appeal more to men’s hearts than her withered
and sickening leer. After some further conversation, which need not be
repeated, I said:

“Cease being a curse to men, and a curse to yourself! Before you die,
repent, and make peace with your Maker, whose image you disgrace.”

She looked wonderingly for a moment, then cast her eyes to the earth.

“My God, sir, I must have a place to sleep to-night. If I sleep out
another night it’ll kill me.”

If all the men and women of this land could have heard the despair in
that woman’s voice! A thousand maxims on virtue, a thousand sermons on
sin could not produce the effect of these words wailed out in the night.
This is the end of the “lark”—traversing the dismal streets, hawking
about the very jewel of womanhood for the price of a ragged quilt and a
covering from the skies.

The charity of a stranger gave her a bed for that night and for other
nights.

There came a night when she didn’t, and in the morning a group of
laborers stood looking at a form huddled close against a fence. Her nails
were full of sand, and the torn turf told the story of her agony as the
purple blood from her lungs had gushed in great clots from her lips.
Her face was pinched and drawn and the eyes stared awfully. The blood
had flowed down her cheek and mingled amid the strands of her hair. A
paragraph in the papers next day told that “the Mayor yesterday granted
an order for the burial of the poor woman found on Garrison street.” She
had enacted the part chosen by her in life. She had been born and had
found a grave.


THE END.




Transcriber’s Note

List of changes made to the original text to correct evident printing or
typesetting errors. Everything else has been left as printed.

  Page 5, duplicate word “you” removed (I believe you are right)
  Page 6, changed “too” to “two” (in her two hands)
  Page 6, changed “nnd” to “and” (and when she took)
  Page 10, changed “tham” to “them” (prison affords them)
  Page 14, changed “cock” to “clock” (about two o’clock)
  Page 14, changed “accross” to “across” (he glanced across)
  Page 14, sub-heading THE SERVANT GIRL’S “FELLER” added
  Page 16, changed “grounns” to “grounds” (favorite fishing grounds)
  Page 16, changed “paroxysim” to “paroxysm” (a paroxysm of bitter tears)
  Page 16, duplicate word “is” removed (Is this a man)
  Page 17, changed “unocked” to “unlocked” (the doors are unlocked)
  Page 18, changed “duputy” to “deputy” (The deputy critically compares)
  Page 18, changed “the” to “to” (and to sharp cries)
  Page 18, changed “hnssars” to “hussars” (a troop of hussars)
  Page 19, changed “and” to “an” (an old-fashioned bonnet)
  Page 19, changed “puieted” to “quieted” (both women are quieted down)
  Page 21, changed “it” to “is” (The end of it is)
  Page 24, changed “accessbile” to “accessible” (the only ones accessible)
  Page 25, changed “forgotton” to “forgotten” (friendless, forgotten, and
             unknown)
  Page 25, duplicate word “to” removed (they invest the barroom to thaw
             themselves)
  Page 25, changed “corrider” to “corridor” (the cell and jail corridor)
  Page 25, changed “inhospitpble” to “inhospitable” (the inhospitable
             market square)
  Page 27, changed “picce” to “piece” (a piece of shell)
  Page 27, changed “Mars chacun a son gont” to “Mais chacun à son goût”
  Page 27, changed “aster” to “after” (after a fashion)
  Page 28, changed “fair” to “fare” (these people fare considerably better)
  Page 28, changed “enfans” to “enfants” (enfants perdus)
  Page 28, changed “drunkiness” to “drunkenness” (drunkenness, laziness
             and dishonesty)
  Page 29, changed “particlular” to “particular” (particular cases brought)
  Page 30, changed “penitentary” to “penitentiary” (the workroom at the
             penitentiary)
  Page 31, changed “few a” to “a few” (a few years ago)
  Page 31, changed “enfans” to “enfants” (enfants perdus)
  Page 32, changed “physicial” to “physical” (the physical strength so
             necessary)
  Page 33, changed “themselevs” to “themselves” (to help themselves)
  Page 36, changed “wern’t” to “weren’t” (I wish they weren’t)
  Page 39, changed “laughterles” to “laughterless” (peals of laughterless
             laughter)
  Page 41, changed “alloted” to “allotted” (its allotted space)
  Page 41, changed “intelligible” to “unintelligible” (the unintelligible
             words)
  Page 43, changed “breaks” to “brakes” (The brakes wouldn’t hold)
  Page 48, changed “suscessful” to “successful” (shrewd and successful)
  Page 50, changed “inebrity” to “inebriety” (slothfulness and inebriety)
  Page 55, changed “favorate” to “favorite” (as the favorite sultana)
  Page 57, “CHAPTER” added (CHAPTER XXXIV.)
  Page 64, changed “lear” to “leer” (withered and sickening leer)





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