glimmer of gold chain and diamond stud, balancing himself first on his
heels and then on his toes, as he rolled a cigar from one side of his
mouth to the other? How did they come to be standing around on corners
and doorsteps by the hundred, like crows on a cornfield fence?

It was some time before I learned that this was the advance guard of a
great army of woman-whippers, which stretched away back to the Atlantic,
and around the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and that they were out on
duty as a staring brigade, whose business it was to insult every woman
who ventured on the street without a male protector, by a stare so
lascivious as could not be imagined on American free soil. I learned
that they all lived, in whole or in part, by the sale of their own
children, and the labor of the mothers extorted by the lash. I came to
know one hoary-haired veteran, whose entire support came from the
natural increase and wages of nineteen women, one of whom, a girl of
eighteen, lived with him in a fashionable boarding-house, waited on him
at table, slept in his room, and of whose yearly wages one hundred and
seventy-five dollars were credited on his board bill.

I learned that none of the shapely hands displayed on the black vests,
had ever used other implement of toil than a pistol, bowie-knife or
slave-whip; that any other tool would ruin the reputation of the owner
of the taper digits; but they did not lose caste by horsewhipping the
old mammys from whose bosoms they had drawn life in infancy.

Our boarding-house was on Walnut street, one block west of the theatre,
and looked toward the river. On the opposite side of the street stood a
two-story brick house, always closed except when a negress opened and
dusted the rooms. I never saw sadness or sorrow until I saw that face;
and it did not appear except about her work, or when she emerged from a