be found. Payment for them is always
refused. As has been stated, they refuse to pay to the owner the amount
received in excess of the loan for an article which has been sold. This,
added to their excessive rate of interest, is said to make their gains
amount to nearly five hundred per cent. on the capital invested in their
business--"the Jews' five per cent."

The principal customers are the poor. Persons of former respectability
or wealth, widows and orphans, are always sure to carry with them into
their poverty some of the trinkets that were theirs in the heyday of
prosperity. These articles go one by one to buy bread. The pawnbroker
advances not more than a twentieth part of their value, and haggles over
that. He knows full well that the pledges will never be redeemed, that
these unhappy creatures must grow less able every day to recover them.
Jewelry, clothing, ornaments of all kinds, and even the wedding ring of
the wife and mother, come to him one by one, never to be regained by
their owners. He takes them at a mere pittance, and sells them at a
profit of several hundred per cent.

You may see the poor pass into the doors of these shops every day. The
saddest faces we ever saw were those of women coming away from them.
Want leaves its victims no choice, but drives them mercilessly into the
clutches of the pawnbroker.

The majority of the articles pawned are forced there by want,
undoubtedly, but very many of them go to buy drink. Women are driven by
brutal husbands to this course, and there are wretches who will
absolutely steal the clothing from their shivering wives and little ones,
and with them procure the means of buying gin.

Of late years another class of pawnbrokers, calling themselves "Diamond
Brokers," has appeared in the city. They make advances on the jewels of
persons--mostly women--in need of money. The extravagance of fashionable
life brings them many customers. They drive as hard bargains as the
others of their class, and their transactions being larger, they grow
rich quicker. They are very discreet, and all dealings with them are
carried on in the strictest secrecy, but, were they disposed, they could
tell many a strange tale by which the peace of some "highly respectable
families" in the Avenue would be rudely disturbed.

XLV. THE BEER-GARDENS.

In some respects, New York is as much German as American. A large part
of it is a genuine reproduction of the Fatherland