lace he had
engaged. I wondered what had happened that so many men were off work in
the middle of the forenoon. Who or what could they be, those fellows in
shining black broadcloth, each with a stove-pipe hat on the side of his
head, his thumbs in the armholes of a satin vest, displaying a wonderful
glimmer of gold chain and diamond stud, balancing himself first on his
heels and then on his toes, as he rolled a cigar from one side of his
mouth to the other? How did they come to be standing around on corners
and doorsteps by the hundred, like crows on a cornfield fence?

It was some time before I learned that this was the advance guard of a
great army of woman-whippers, which stretched away back to the Atlantic,
and around the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and that they were out on
duty as a staring brigade, whose business it was to insult every woman
who ventured on the street without a male protector, by a stare so
lascivious as could not be imagined on American free soil. I learned
that they all lived, in whole or in part, by the sale of their own
children, and the labor of the mothers extorted by the lash. I came to
know one hoary-haired veteran, whose entire support came from the
natural increase and wages of nineteen women, one of whom, a girl of
eighteen, lived with him in a fashionable boarding-house, waited on him
at table, slept in his room, and of whose yearly wages one hundred and
seventy-five dollars were credited on his board bill.

I learned that none of the shapely hands displayed on the black vests,
had ever used other implement of toil than a pistol, bowie-knife or
slave-whip; that any other tool would ruin the reputation of the owner
of the taper digits; but they did not lose caste by horsewhipping the
old mammys from whose bosoms they had drawn life in infancy.

Our boarding-house was on Walnut street, one block west of the theatre,
and looked toward the river. On the opposite side of the street stood a
two-story brick house, always closed except when a negress opened and
dusted the rooms. I never saw sadness or sorrow until I saw that face;
and it did not appear except about her work, or when she emerged from a
side gate to call in two mulatto children, who sometimes came out on the
pavement.

This house belonged to a Northern "mudsill," who kept a grocery, and
owned the woman, who was the mother of five children, of whom he was the
father. The older two he had sold, one at a time, as they became