THE MOST DREADFUL FEATURES
of these wicked holes. A small fee was charged, but the proprietor depended more on the sale of bad liquor for his profits than on this admission. Many of the revelers had other business speculations in their eye, and woe be to the man wearing anything of value who did not keep all his senses about him, and even then he was not safe.
“Having paid my ten cents to a young man at the foot of the stairs,” says an eye-witness of one of these orgies, “I descended into a cellar whose rough stone walls had once been whitewashed, but which were now discolored with the slimy moisture which oozed therefrom. The place was not large, and the 12 or 15 couple who were on the floor did not have much room in which to turn. Two colored lads supplied the music, one playing a very wheezy concertina, and the other tooting a fife. The company was largely composed of bad women and thieves. Here and there, however, could be seen a man who ought to be respectable, and who usually was accounted among his fellow-men as such. They were on the spree, and one of them, a master plasterer, I was told had been around the place for a week. He was sitting on a stone which had been pulled out of the wall, with a loathsome-looking creature seated on his knee. Among the