Why these panderers to depravity in all its most hideous forms are permitted to continue their depredations among every rank of society without attracting the attention of "reformers" or the grand jury is something beyond the ken of human knowledge. And as a block is a small cityful in some parts of the town, the reading of palms, the casting of horoscopes and the looking into seeds of time through the backs of a greasy pack of thumb-marked, tear-stained cards is a profitable calling. Perhaps it should be explained that the tears are not shed by the prophets of the tenements, but by the patrons who go to the oracle to learn if they are to be dispossessed next month or if their ambitious children will sometime learn a little Yiddish, so that they may talk with their own parents in their own homes, are sources of information for the settlement workers and others who try to learn the hopes and fears and ambitions, the real life of such places. But the fortune tellers are the real custodians of the Ghetto's secrets. In their little back rooms, some of which are cluttered with the trash that suggests the occult to the believer, some as bare as the room of a lodger who has pawned the last stick of furniture, they hear confessions that court interpreters never have a chance to translate, and listen to tales of hard luck that are never told to the rabbis.
Chair with open back stuffed with disguises
Supposed "Medium" Sitting in the Chair.
Prognostications Are Vague.
But they don't use the mails to drum up trade, and they have no barkers at the doorsteps to cajole the credulous to step inside to learn what the future has in store for them. And so, in a legal sense, they are guilty of no fraud. They are not very serious frauds in any sense, for their tricks are harmless and their prognostications are vague as the weather predictions of an almanac and as probable as the sayings of the cart-tail orators who hold forth at the street corners in campaign time.
"About this time, look for cold winds, with some snow," sagely remarks the almanac writer, stringing the ten words of his prediction down the entire column of the month.
"In a few years," says the fortune teller, solemnly, "you will have good friends and more money than you have now."