Q. K. Philander Doesticks

“ Presently there came from the closet a sound of half-suppressed merriment, as if a constant succession of laughs were born there, full grown and boisterous, but were instantly garroted by some unknown power, until each one expired in a kind of choky giggle. There was also a noise of the making of a bed, the hustling of chairs, the putting away of toilet articles out of sight, and over all was heard the chiding voice [362] of Madame Harris, who was evidently dressing herself, superintending these other various operations, and scolding the weak-eyed maiden all at once. ”

“ You have seen much trouble, some of it in business, and some of it in love, but there are brighter days in store for you before long—you face up a letter—you face up love—you face up marriage—you face up a light-haired woman, with dark eyes, you think a great deal of her, and she thinks a great deal of you ”

“ Johannes drummed up his youthful recollections of that interesting event, and gave the day, the hour, and the minute, with his accustomed accuracy. The sage made an exact minute of these wet-nurse items on a cheap slate with a stub of a pencil; then taking another cheap slate, he proceeded to draw a horoscope thereon, pausing a little over the signs of the zodiac, as if he was a little out in his astronomy, and wasn’t exactly certain whether there should be twelve or twenty. ”

“ A shabby-looking girl, with her hair in as much confusion as if the city had contracted to keep it straight, with one ear-ring in her ear, and the other on the table, with her shoes down at the heel, her dress unhooked behind, and her breast-pin wrong side up, was the model young woman who had answered the knock. ”

“ The shattered wrecks of worn-out drays and carts stand forsaken in the street, keeping each other dismal company, while an occasional shackly wheelbarrow makes the place look as though, after some monstrous fashion, it were a lying-in hospital for poverty-stricken vehicles, and the wheelbarrows were the new-born children, decrepit even in their babyhood. The houses in this pleasant vale have a disheartened tumble-down look, and give the impression of having been originally built by apprentices out of second-hand material. ”

“ Kettles, camp-fires, white tents under green trees, indigenous brown babies and exotic white ones, with a panorama of empty cradles and mourning mothers in the distance, moonlight nights, midnight foraging excursions, expeditions against impertinent game-keepers, demonstrations against hen-roosts—successful by masterly generalship and pure strategic science—and the midnight forest cookery of contraband game, surreptitious pigs and clandestine chickens—were among the romantic ideas of a delightful vagabond gipsy life that at once suggested themselves to the mind of the Cash Customer. ”

“ A tumble-down trunk in a corner of the room did precarious duty for a chair; a faded carpet hid the floor; a cheap rocking-chair in the act of moulting its upholstery spread its luxurious arms invitingly near the dim window; and a table, on which a pack of German playing cards was coyly half concealed by a newspaper, a coal-hod, and a poker, completed the necessary furnishing of the apartment. ”

“ Because no one of us has ever encountered a witch on her basswood steed, shall we presume to assert that witches no longer bestride basswood steeds and make their nocturnal excursions to blasted heaths, there to meet the devil in the social midnight orgie, and kick up their withered heels in the gay diabolical dance with other ancient females of like kidney with themselves? ”

“ Madame Leander Lent is one of the most shrewd, unscrupulous, and dirty of all the goodly sisterhood of New York witches. She has so great a run of customers that her doors are often besieged by anxious inquirers as early as eight o’clock in the morning, and the servant is frequently puzzled to find room and chairs to accommodate the shame-faced throng, till her ladyship sees fit to get out of bed and begin the labors of the day. ”

“ How the “Individual” sees a Clairvoyant—How he pays a Dollar, and what he gets for his money.
Not all the sorcery of all the sorcerers; not all the necromancy of all the necromancers; not all the conjurations of all masculine conjurers; not all the magic of all male magicians; not all the charming of all the charmers, charm they never so wisely, could have induced Johannes to ever more place the slightest trust in a wizard, or repose in any wonderworker of the bearded sex the merest trifle of faith, even the most [174] infinitesimal trituration of the homœopathicest grain. ”

“ CONCLUSION. It has been already mentioned that there are a number of persons in the city who do more or less in the fortune-telling way, who never advertise for customers. These we must leave to their own seclusion; as our business has been with those who make a business of this species of swindling, and who use all manner of arts to entice the curious, or the credulous, into their dens, there not only robbing them of their money, but often putting them in the way to be injured much more deeply. ”

“ This prolific and valuable deposit that covers Broome Street bears perennial crops: in the spring and summer, dirty-faced children and mean-looking dogs seem to spring from it spontaneously; they are succeeded during the colder weather by a crop of tumble-down barrels, and cast-away broken carts; while the humbler and more insignificant things, the uncared for weeds, so to speak, of the abundant harvest, such as potato parings, and fish heads, and shreds of ragged dish-cloths, and bits of broken crockery, and old bones, are in season all the year round. ”

“ The parlor was neatly, though rather scantily furnished, with a rigid economy in the article of chairs. The apartment communicated by folding-doors with another room, whence could be heard an iron noise as of some one scraping a saucepan with a kitchen-spoon. The frowzy girl disappeared into this retired spot, and in about the space of time that would be occupied by an enterprising woman in rolling down her sleeves, taking off her apron, and washing her hands, the door opened, and Mrs. Seymour presented herself. ”

“ Hayes is a tall, fierce, sharp-spoken man, of manners so very rough and bearish that his wife and children quailed when he spoke as if they expected an instant blow. We don’t know that it ever will be possible for a man to garrote his guardian angel for the sake of her golden crown, but the idea occurred to Johannes that if that amiable feat is ever accomplished, it will be by such another man as this. He seemed as unable to speak a kind or gentle word as to pull his boots off over his ears. ”

“ Your professional clairvoyant is always, both as to soul and body, a botched-up job that nature ought to be ashamed of, and probably is, if she’d own up.
The senior partner of the clairvoyant fortune-telling firm, the strong-minded one, according to their professions, has the arbitrary control of the cast-off souls that animate these refuse bodies. By what spiritual hocus-pocus this is managed is not known to those outside the trade. He uses their half-baked spirits at his will, and makes his living by farming them out to do dirty jobs for the paying public. ”

“ Her exertions in either profession have not as yet gained her a very large fortune, judging from the surroundings of her eligible residence.
The domicile of this chrysalis enchantress is a low frame house of two stories, standing back from the street, directly in the rear of another row of more pretentious mansions, as if it had been sent into the back yard in disgrace and never permitted to show itself in good society again. It seems conscious of its humiliation, and wears an air of architectural [111] dejection that is quite touching. ”

“ Micawber encountered, and who, when once down, might remain perpetually floored, did not some kind friend set them on their financial feet again.
And this is one of the duties of the monied mistress. When the “sporting man” is in funds, no one is more recklessly extravagant than he, and no one cuts a greater dash than his “ladye-love,” if he chooses so to do; but when the cards run cross, and the purse is empty, it devolves upon her to furnish the capital to start in the world again. ”

“ A gentleman of this city, in whose word I have the most perfect confidence, tells me that he once, by a curious accident, overheard a business consultation between the two members of such a firm; and that such partnerships do exist, and that by their means hundreds of ignorant young women, of the lower classes, are every year betrayed to their moral ruin, I no more doubt than I doubt the rotundity of the earth. ”

“ She never took her steel-blue eyes from her visitor’s face; she did not for an instant relax her confident smile; she did not speak but in the lowest softest tones; but her auditor felt every instant more convinced that the voice was the falsest voice he ever heard, the smile the falsest smile he ever saw, and that the [343] cold piercing eye alone was true, and that was only true because no art could conceal its calculating glitter.
If one could imagine a smiling cat, Madame Clifton would resemble that cat more than any one thing in the world. ”

“ And in almost every neighborhood in any part of the country, there will be one or more old women who delight in mystifying the young folks by telling fortunes in tea-cups, by means of the ominous settling of the “grounds;”—or who, sometimes, even “run the cards,” or aspire to read the fates by the portentous turning of the Bible and key. All these conjurations are given without money and without price in the rural districts, but they sometimes work no little mischief. ”

“ The romantic gipsy who sojourned here had tried to furnish her rooms like civilized people, doubtless out of respect to her many patrons. A thread-bare carpet was under foot; a little parlor stove with a little fire in it was standing on a little piece of zinc, and did its little utmost to heat the room; an uncomfortable looking sofa covered with shabby and faded red damask graced one side of the apartment, and a lounge, of curtailed dimensions, partially covered with shreds of turkey red calico, adorned another side. ”

“ Her face is deeply pitted with the small-pox, more than pitted—gullied, scarred, and seamed, as though some jealous rival had been trying to plough her complexion under; little short light hairs are thinly scattered on her cheek bones and upper lip, and in the shadows of the little ridges that disease had left, irresistibly compelling the mind to make an absurd comparison of her face with a sterile field, and imagine that at some past day it had been spaded up to plant a beard, which had only grown in scanty patches, here and there. ”

“ She invariably dodged the question, and dealt only in the most vague and uncertain generalities—giving no [214] description of persons or things that might not have applied with equal accuracy to a hundred other persons or things in that or any other locality. Her assertions concerning the persons supposed to be her customer’s friends did not approach the truth in any one particular; nor was there the slightest shadow of even probability in any single statement she uttered. She is not, however, a woman to lack customers, so long as there remain in the world fools of either sex. ”

“ The street is in a state of perennial bloom with half-built dwellings like gaudy scarlet blossoms, which are ripened into tenements by the fostering care of masons and carpenters with the most industrious forcing; and buds of buildings are scattered in every direction, in the shape of mortar-beds and piles of brick and lumber, waiting the due time for their architectural sprouting. ”

“ It needed no long cogitation or extended argument to convince Johannes, the “Individual,” the Cash Customer, of the immense practical value of such a steed, to say nothing of his costing nothing to keep, and of its therefore being utterly impossible for him to “eat his own head off,” and of his never growing old, and of his never having any of the multitudinous diseases that afflict ordinary horses without any intermixture of magic blood, and therefore of it being out of the question for anybody to cheat his owner in a horse-trade. ”

“ Madame Lane is of the Irish breed; is red-haired, freckled, and dirty to a degree. Her dress was ragged, showing a soiled, dingy petticoat through the rents.
She seated her customer in the little room, produced a pack of cards, and proceeded to tell his future, at times shouting out threats and words of warning to the noisy brats outside. Then she said:
“You are a man as has seen a great deal of trouble in the past.” ”

“ Nor are the fortune-tellers and the brothel-keepers by any means content with playing into each other’s hands in a general sort of way; there are, in New York, several firms, consisting each of a fortune-teller and a mistress of a bawdy-house, who have entered into a perfectly organized business partnership, and who ply their fearful trade with as much zeal and enthusiasm as is ever exhibited in the active competition between rival commercial houses engaged in legitimate trade. ”

“ If the lady shut out the whole masculine world from the inevitable fascinations of her superabundant charms, was it not for sweet charity’s sake, that a whole community might not go into ecstatic frenzies over her peerless beauty, and all men, being stricken in love of the same woman, go to cutting each other’s throats with bowie-knives and other modern improvements! ”

“ Not that the witches’ money, like the fairies’ gold, will be likely to turn into chips and pebbles in your pocket, but all these fortune-tellers are expert passers of counterfeit and broken bank-notes and bogus coin; and they never lose an opportunity thus to victimize a customer. ”

“ You will never have much money from relations or friends, though you will, I should say, perhaps have some—but though you will handle a great deal of money in your lifetime you will make the most of it yourself, I should say—you will not, however, I should say, ever be able for to become very rich, for you will never be able for to keep money, although you will have the handling of a great deal in your life. ”