Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/423

Rh here into a large square. These streets, and especially the square, are the haunts of the extremest misery of that great city. Lower than to the Five Points it is not possible for fallen human nature to sink. Here are public dens of prostitution, where miserable women keep so-called “fancy-men,” and “fancy-women.” Quarrels and blows, theft and even murder, belong to the order of day and night. There is in the square, in particular, one large, yellow-coloured, dilapidated old house, called “the Old Brewery,” because formerly it was employed as such. This house is properly the head-quarters of vice and misery. And the old brewer of all the world's misery, the Evil One himself, has dominion there at this day.

We, Mrs. G. and myself, went alone through this house, where we visited many hidden dens, and conversed with their inhabitants. We considered it better and safer to go about here alone than in company with a gentleman. Neither did we meet any instance of rudeness nor even of incivility. We saw young lads sitting at the gaming-table with old ruffians; unfortunate women suffering from horrible diseases, sickly children, giddy young girls, ill-tempered women quarrelling with the whole world, and some families, also we saw, who seemed to me, wretched rather through poverty than moral degradation. From unabashed, hardened crime, to those who, sinking under the consequences of vice, are passing down to death—without an ear to listen to their groans, without sympathy and without hope—every grade of moral corruption, may be found festering and fermenting in this Old Brewery; filth, rags, pestilent air, everything is in that Old Brewery, and yet after all, I did not see anything there worse than I had seen before in Paris, London, and Stockholm. Ah, in all large cities where human masses congregrate, may be found the Old Brewery of vice and misery, dens where the old brewer distils his poison. The off-scouring of society flows hither, becomes still more