OF BOTH SEXES.

_The Pretty Flower and News Girls--The Young Wharf Rats and their
Eventful Lives--How they all Live, where they Come From, and where they
finally Finish their Career._

To the wealthy resident of Fifth avenue and other noted fashionable
thoroughfares, the incidents of actual every-day life that are here
revealed will read like a revelation. To the merchant and the business
man they may probably read like romance. To the thrifty mechanic,
however, who occupies a vastly different social sphere, who hurries to
his work in the morning, and with equal haste seeks to reach his home at
night, this chapter may, perhaps, cause a tear to glisten in his manly
eye when the facts, here written for the first time, meet his gaze, and,
may be, are associated with some young male or female relation or friend
who has "gone wrong." But to the officers of the Society for the
Suppression of Vice, and other kindred useful societies, newspaper men,
the police, and others whose daily vocations happen to keep them out
late o' nights, the truths here unfolded are of too frequent occurrence
and are too familiar sights to need any other corroborative evidence
than is supplied by their own experience and the exercise of their own
observation.

Youthful vice and depravity, of all grades, is, unfortunately, the
natural result of that civilization which finds its outgrowth in large
and necessarily closely-packed communities. Where ground is dear, poor
people must seek rooms in dwellings where the rent is cheap, and these
dwellings are, for the most part, erected in cheap neighborhoods--and
cheap neighborhoods mean questionable companionships and associations,
and bad associations beget a familiarity with immorality of all kinds.
No one can question the truth of this. For instance, the honest and
industrious mechanic, receiving fair wages for his work, must hire
lodgings or rooms in some tenement; he goes to work during the day,
leaving his wife, if he happens to have one, at home to perform those
hard household duties which fall to the lot of her class; the
children--and there are generally several, for one of the chief luxuries
within the reach of the poor is children--are allowed to take care of
themselves as best they can between times; they naturally go to the
streets to play; they have no gardens, with shady graveled walks running
between beds of bright flowers; no nursery, no governesses, no nurses
with French caps, and, shame