he witches' money,
like the fairies' gold, will be likely to turn into chips and
pebbles in your pocket, but all these fortune-tellers are expert
passers of counterfeit and broken bank-notes and bogus coin; and
they never lose an opportunity thus to victimize a customer.]

Fortified with dinner, dessert, and cigars, the cash customer
departed on his voyage of discovery in search of "MADAME BRUCE,
THE MYSTERIOUS VEILED LADY," who carries on all the business she
can get by the subjoined advertisement:

"ASTONISHING TO ALL.-Madame BRUCE, the Mysterious
Veiled Lady, can be consulted on all events of life, at
No. 513 Broome st., one door from Thompson. She is a
second-sight seer, and was born with a natural gift."

The "Individual," modestly speaking of himself in the third
person, admits that, being then a single man of some respectability,
he was at that very period looking out for a profitable partner
of his bosom, sorrows, joys, and expenses. He naturally preferred
one who could do something towards taking a share of the
expensive responsibility of a family off his hands, and was not
disposed to object to one who was even afflicted with money;--next
to that woman, whom he had not yet discovered, a lady with a
"natural gift" for money-making was evidently the most eligible
of matrimonial speculations. Whether he really cherished an
humble hope that the veil of Madame Bruce might be of semi-transparent
stuff, and that she might discover and be smitten by his manly
charms, and ask his hand in marriage, and eventually bear him
away, a blushing husband, to the altar, or whatever might be
hastily substituted for that connubial convenience, will never be
officially known to the world. Certain it is that he expected
great results of some sort to eventuate from his visit to this
obnubilated prophetess, and that he paid extraordinary attention
to the decoration of the external homo, and to the administration
of encouraging stimuli to the inner individual, probably with a
view to submerge, for the time, his characteristic bashfulness,
before he set out to visit the fair inscrutable of Broome-street.

The nature of his secret cogitations, as he walked along, was
somewhat as follows, though he himself has never before revealed
the same to mortal man.

He was of course uncertain as to her personal attractiveness;
owing to that mysterious veil there was a doubt as to her
surpassing beauty. At any rate he did