half-drunken
performer, or a couple or more musicians who cannot by any possible means
draw melody from their wheezy instruments.

Persons entering these places assume a considerable risk. They
voluntarily place themselves in the midst of a number of abandoned
wretches, who are ready for any deed of violence or crime. They care for
nothing but money, and will rob or kill for it. Respectable people have
no business in such places. They are very apt to have their pockets
picked, and are in danger of violence. Many men, who leave their happy
homes in the morning, visit these places, for amusement or through
curiosity, at night. They are drugged, robbed, murdered, and then the
harbor police may find their lifeless forms floating in the river at
daybreak.

The women known outside of the city as "pretty waiter girls," are simply
a collection of poor wretches who have gone down almost to the end of
their fatal career. They may retain faint vestiges of their former
beauty, but that is all. They are beastly, foul-mouthed, brutal
wretches. Very many of them are half dead with consumption and disease.
They are in every respect disgusting. Yet young and old men, strangers
and citizens, come here to talk with them and spend their money on them.
Says the writer we have quoted, after describing a characteristic scene
in one of these places:

"The only noticeable thing about this exhibition of beastliness is the
utter unconcern of the other occupants of the room. They are accustomed
to it. One wonders, too, at the attraction this has for strangers.
There is really nothing in the people, the place, or the onlookers worthy
of a decent man's curiosity. The girls are, without exception, the
nastiest, most besotted drabs that ever walked the streets. They haven't
even the pride that clings to certain of their sisters who are in prison.
The whole assemblage, with the exception of such stragglers as myself,
who have a motive in studying it, is a mess of the meanest human rubbish
that a great city exudes. In the company there is a large preponderance
of the cub of seventeen and eighteen. Some of these boys are the sons of
merchants and lawyers, and are 'seeing life.' If they were told to go
into their kitchens at home and talk with the cook and the chambermaid,
they would consider themselves insulted. Yet they come here and talk
with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant and unattractive as the
servants at home--only t