uman charnel-houses. In some instances
fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the
fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country girls, who have
been inveigled into these dens by the arts of procuresses or brought
there by their seducers. Unsophisticated and unacquainted with life in a
great city, without money or friends, they have been entrapped and
compelled to submit to a life of shame by the coarse words and
frequently the brutal violence of their captors.

Between the two extremes of unfortunates already described, there is
another class nomadic in their habits. Some of these are street-walkers,
some frequent dance houses like The Allen's, Billy McGlory's, Owney
Geoghegan's and Harry Hill's, while others circulate around such
up-town, west-side houses as the French Madame's, the Haymarket and Tom
Gould's. They usually live in furnished rooms, in houses owned by
wealthy and respectable citizens, let to them by agents who lease them
at exorbitant rents, paid in advance. In both the eastern, western and
central portions of the city they may be found occupying rooms on the
same floors with respectable families. These women seldom conduct the
prey that they have allured to their home, but to some assignation house
or fourth-rate hotel, of which there are a large number scattered over
the city.

Most of this class of unfortunates have a "lover"--a gambler or pimp,
who occupies their room and assumes the role of husband and protector
for the nonce, with the privilege of spending the girl's blood money in
drink or dissipation, and unmercifully beating her when he feels
inclined that way. The pair call this place their home, and as they are
shiftless in their habits, and careless of sickness, they are frequently
in a condition of chronic impecuniosity and are thus liable to be "fired
out" by the heartless agent. Many of these girls, from their association
with vicious society, become thieves, and ply their light-fingered
privateering while caressing their victim. It is a favorite dodge of
some of the more comely and shapely of this class, especially the
frequenters of such places as Gould's, the Haymarket, the French
Ma-dames, the Star and Garter, and the Empire, to ask gentlemen on whom
they have been unavailingly airing their becks and nods and other
fascinations to put a quarter into the top of their hosiery "for luck."
They usually get the quarter, and sometimes the man as well.