Each cell door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of
the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps;
others shrink away in shame. - For what offence can that lonely
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child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh! that boy?
He is the son of the prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against
his father; and is detained here for safe keeping, until the trial;
that's all.
But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and
nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is
it not? - What says our conductor?
'Well, it an't a very rowdy life, and THAT'S a fact!'
Again he clinks his metal castanet, and leads us leisurely away. I
have a question to ask him as we go.
'Pray, why do they call this place The Tombs?'
'Well, it's the cant name.'
'I know it is. Why?'
'Some suicides happened here, when it was first built. I expect it
come about from that.'
'I saw just now, that that man's clothes were scattered about the
floor of his cell. Don't you oblige the prisoners to be orderly,
and put such things away?'
'Where should they put 'em?'
'Not on the ground surely. What do you say to hanging them up?'
He stops and looks round to emphasise his answer:
'Why, I say that's just it. When they had hooks they WOULD hang
themselves, so they're taken out of every cell, and there's only
the marks left where they used to be!'
The prison-yard in which he pauses now, has been the scene of
terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place, men are
brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the
gibbet on the ground; the rope about his neck; and when the sign is
given, a weight at its other end comes running down, and swings him
up into the air - a corpse.
The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle,
the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five.
From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad, the
thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them,
the prison-wall is interposed as a thick gloomy veil. It is the
curtain to his bed of death, his winding-sheet, and grave. From
him it shuts out life, and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood
in that last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often allsufficient
to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no
ruffians to uphold a ruffian's name before. All beyond the
pitiless stone wall, is unknown space.
Let us go forth again into the cheerful streets.
Once more in Broadway! Here are the same ladies in bright colours,
walking to and fro, in pairs and singly; yonder the very same light
blue parasol which passed and repassed the hotel-window twenty
times while we were sitting there. We are going to cross here.
Take care of the pigs. Two portly sows are trotting up behind this
carriage, and a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs have
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just now turned the corner.
Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself. He has only
one ear; having parted with the other to vagrant-dogs in the course
of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it; and
leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life, somewhat
answering to that of our club-men at home. He leaves his lodgings
every morning at a certain hour, throws himself upon the town, gets
through his day in some manner quite satisfactory to himself, and
regularly appears at the door of his own house again at night, like
the mysterious master of Gil Blas. He is a free-and-easy,
careless, indifferent kind of pig, having a very large acquaintance
among other pigs of the same character, whom he rather knows by
sight than conversation, as he seldom troubles himself to stop and
exchange civilities, but goes grunting down the kennel, turning up
the news and small-talk of the city in the shape of cabbage-stalks
and offal, and bearing no tails but his own: which is a very short
one, for his old enemies, the dogs, have been at that too, and have
left him hardly enough to swear by. He is in every respect a
republican pig, going wherever he pleases, and mingling with the
best society, on an equal, if not superior footing, for every one
makes way when he appears, and the haughtiest give him the wall, if
he prefer it. He is a great philosopher, and seldom moved, unless
by the dogs before mentioned. Sometimes, indeed, you may see his
small eye twinkling on a slaughtered friend, whose carcase
garnishes a butcher's door-post, but he grunts out 'Such is life:
all flesh is pork!' buries his nose in the mire again, and waddles
down the gutter: comforting himself with the reflection that there
is one snout the less to anticipate stray cabbage-stalks, at any
rate.
They are the city scavengers, these pigs. Ugly brutes they are;
having, for the most part, scanty brown backs, like the lids of old
horsehair trunks: spotted with unwholesome black blotches. They
have long, gaunt legs, too, and such peaked snouts, that if one of
them could be persuaded to sit for his profile, nobody would
recognise it for a pig's likeness. They are never attended upon,
or fed, or driven, or caught, but are thrown upon their own
resources in early life, and become preternaturally knowing in
consequence. Every pig knows where he lives, much better than
anybody could tell him. At this hour, just as evening is closing
in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their
way to the last. Occasionally, some youth among them who has overeaten
himself, or has been worried by dogs, trots shrinkingly
homeward, like a prodigal son: but this is a rare case: perfect
self-possession and self-reliance, and immovable composure, being
their foremost attributes.
The streets and shops are lighted now; and as the eye travels down
the long thoroughfare, dotted with bright jets of gas, it is
reminded of Oxford Street, or Piccadilly. Here and there a flight
of broad stone cellar-steps appears, and a painted lamp directs you
to the Bowling Saloon, or Ten-Pin alley; Ten-Pins being a game of
mingled chance and skill, invented when the legislature passed an
act forbidding Nine-Pins. At other downward flights of steps, are
other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster-cellars - pleasant
retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of
oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese-plates (or for thy dear
sake, heartiest of Greek Professors!), but because of all kinds of
caters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the
swallowers of oysters alone are not gregarious; but subduing
themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and
copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in
curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not
by two hundreds.
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But how quiet the streets are! Are there no itinerant bands; no
wind or stringed instruments? No, not one. By day, are there no
Punches, Fantoccini, Dancing-dogs, Jugglers, Conjurers,
Orchestrinas, or even Barrel-organs? No, not one. Yes, I remember
one. One barrel-organ and a dancing-monkey - sportive by nature,
but fast fading into a dull, lumpish monkey, of the Utilitarian
school. Beyond that, nothing lively; no, not so much as a white
mouse in a twirling cage.
Are there no amusements? Yes. There is a lecture-room across the
way, from which that glare of light proceeds, and there may be
evening service for the ladies thrice a week, or oftener. For the
young gentlemen, there is the counting-house, the store, the barroom:
the latter, as you may see through these windows, pretty
full. Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of
ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the
process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass! No
amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of
strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety
of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty
newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the
street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but
amusements? Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff;
dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs
of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and
pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined
lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life
the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed
and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and
good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping
of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey. - No
amusements!
Let us go on again; and passing this wilderness of an hotel with
stores about its base, like some Continental theatre, or the London
Opera House shorn of its colonnade, plunge into the Five Points.
But it is needful, first, that we take as our escort these two
heads of the police, whom you would know for sharp and well-trained
officers if you met them in the Great Desert. So true it is, that
certain pursuits, wherever carried on, will stamp men with the same
character. These two might have been begotten, born, and bred, in
Bow Street.
We have seen no beggars in the streets by night or day; but of
other kinds of strollers, plenty. Poverty, wretchedness, and vice,
are rife enough where we are going now.
This is the place: these narrow ways, diverging to the right and
left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as
are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse
and bloated faces at the doors, have counterparts at home, and all
the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses
prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and
how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes
that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live
here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu
of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?
So far, nearly every house is a low tavern; and on the bar-room
walls, are coloured prints of Washington, and Queen Victoria of
England, and the American Eagle. Among the pigeon-holes that hold
the bottles, are pieces of plate-glass and coloured paper, for
there is, in some sort, a taste for decoration, even here. And as
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seamen frequent these haunts, there are maritime pictures by the
dozen: of partings between sailors and their lady-loves, portraits
of William, of the ballad, and his Black-Eyed Susan; of Will Watch,
the Bold Smuggler; of Paul Jones the Pirate, and the like: on
which the painted eyes of Queen Victoria, and of Washington to
boot, rest in as strange companionship, as on most of the scenes
that are enacted in their wondering presence.
What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A
kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only
by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies beyond this tottering
flight of steps, that creak beneath our tread? - a miserable room,
lighted by one dim candle, and destitute of all comfort, save that
which may be hidden in a wretched bed. Beside it, sits a man: his
elbows on his knees: his forehead hidden in his hands. 'What ails
that man?' asks the foremost officer. 'Fever,' he sullenly
replies, without looking up. Conceive the fancies of a feverish
brain, in such a place as this!
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the
trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den,
where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A
negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer's voice - he
knows it well - but comforted by his assurance that he has not come
on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The
match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusty rags
before, if there can be degrees in such extremes. He stumbles down
the stairs and presently comes back, shading a flaring taper with
his hand. Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise
slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women,
waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their
bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and
fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished African face
in some strange mirror.
Mount up these other stairs with no less caution (there are traps
and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as
ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet
overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the
roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of
sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is
a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round
the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate.
From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats,
some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near
at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where
dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to
sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better
lodgings.
Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep,
underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked
with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American
eagles out of number: ruined ho
uses, open to the street, whence,
through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as
though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show:
hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder:
all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.
Our leader has his hand upon the latch of 'Almack's,' and calls to
us from the bottom of the steps; for the assembly-room of the Five
Point fashionables is approached by a descent. Shall we go in? It
is but a moment.
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Heyday! the landlady of Almack's thrives! A buxom fat mulatto
woman, with sparkling eyes, whose head is daintily ornamented with
a handkerchief of many colours. Nor is the landlord much behind
her in his finery, being attired in a smart blue jacket, like a
ship's steward, with a thick gold ring upon his little finger, and
round his neck a gleaming golden watch-guard. How glad he is to
see us! What will we please to call for? A dance? It shall be
done directly, sir: 'a regular break-down.'
The corpulent black fiddler, and his friend who plays the
tambourine, stamp upon the boarding of the small raised orchestra
in which they sit, and play a lively measure. Five or six couple
come upon the floor, marshalled by a lively young negro, who is the
wit of the assembly, and the greatest dancer known. He never
leaves off making queer faces, and is the delight of all the rest,
who grin from ear to ear incessantly. Among the dancers are two
young mulatto girls, with large, black, drooping eyes, and headgear
after the fashion of the hostess, who are as shy, or feign to
be, as though they never danced before, and so look down before the
visitors, that their partners can see nothing but the long fringed
lashes.
But the dance commences. Every gentleman sets as long as he likes
to the opposite lady, and the opposite lady to him, and all are so
long about it that the sport begins to languish, when suddenly the
lively hero dashes in to the rescue. Instantly the fiddler grins,
and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the
tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the
landlady; new confidence in the landlord; new brightness in the
very candles.
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his