o published advertisements of assignations at a dollar a
line; here was a cigar manufacturer, whose smug face was upon every
billboard--he had begun as a tin manufacturer, and to avoid the duty,
he had had his raw material cast in the form of statues, and brought
them in as works of art!

And terrible and vile as were the sources from which the fortunes had
been derived, they were no viler nor more terrible than the purposes
for which they had been spent. Mrs. Vivie Patton had hinted to Montague
of a "Decameron Club," whose members gathered in each others' homes and
vied in the telling of obscene stories; Strathcona had told him about
another set of exquisite ladies and gentlemen who gave elaborate
entertainments, in which they dressed in the costumes of bygone
periods, and imitated famous characters in history, and the vices and
orgies of courts and camps. One heard of "Cleopatra nights" on board of
yachts at Newport. There was a certain Wall Street "plunger," who had
begun life as a mining man in the West; and when his customers came in
town, he would hire a trolley-car, and take a load of champagne and
half a dozen prostitutes, and spend the night careering about the
country. This man was now quartered in one of the great hotels in New
York; and in his apartments he would have prize fights and chicken
fights; and bloodthirsty exhibitions called "purring matches," in which
men tried to bark each other's shins; or perhaps a "battle royal," with
a diamond scarf-pin dangling from the ceiling, and half a dozen negroes
in a free-for-all fight for the prize.

No picture of the ways of the Metropolis would be complete which did
not force upon the reluctant reader some realization of the extent to
which new and hideous incitements to vice were spreading. To say that
among the leisured classes such practices were raging like a pestilence
would be no exaggeration. Ten years ago they were regarded with
aversion by even the professionally vicious; but now the commonest
prostitute accepted them as part of her fate. And there was no height
to which they had not reached--ministers of state were enslaved by
them; great fortunes and public events were controlled by them. In
Washington there had been an ambassador whose natural daughter taught
them in the houses of the great, until the scandal forced the
minister's recall. Some of these practices were terrible in their
effects, completely wrecking the victim in a short time; and physi