'Oh, God!' said the stranger, shuddering—'this is horrible!'
'Pooh!' rejoined the boy—'that's nothing at all to what you will see if you have the courage and inclination to follow me wherever I shall lead you, in these vaults.'
In another cavern an awful scene presented itself. It was an Irish wake—a dead body lay upon the table, and the relations and friends of the deceased were howling their lamentations over it. An awful stench emanating from the corpse, indicated that the process of decomposition had already commenced. In one corner, several half-crazed, drunken, naked wretches were fighting with the ferocity of tigers, and the mourners soon joining in the fray, a general combat ensued, in the fury of which, the table on which lay the body was overturned, and the corpse was crushed beneath the feet of the combatants.
Leaving this appalling scene, the boy and the stranger passed on, until they stood before a cave which was literally crammed with human beings. Men and women, boys and girls, young children, negroes, and hogs were laying indiscriminately upon the ground, in a compact mass. Some were cursing each other with fierce oaths; and horrible to relate! negroes were lying with young white girls, and several, unmindful of the presence of others, were perpetrating the most dreadful enormities. These beings were vile and loathsome in appearance, beyond all human conception; every one of them was a mass of rags, filth, disease, and corruption. As the stranger surveyed the loathsome group, he said to his guide, with a refinement of speech he had not before assumed—
'Had any one, two hours ago, assured me that such a place as this, containing such horrible inmates, existed in the very heart of the city, I would have given him the lie direct! But I see it for myself, and am forced to believe it.'
'These wretches,' said the boy—'are many of them related to each other. There are husbands and wives there; mothers and children; brothers and sisters. Yet they all herd together, you see, without regard to nature or decency. Why the crime of incest is as common among them as dirt! I have known a mother and her son—a father and his daughter—a brother and sister—to be guilty of criminal intimacy! Those wretched children are many of them the offspring of such unnatural and beastly connections. In my opinion, those hogs have as good a claim to humanity, as those brutes in human form!'
'And how came those hogs to form part of the inhabitants of this infernal place?' asked the stranger.
'You must know,' replied the boy,'that these vaults communicate with the common street sewers of the city; well, those animals get into the sewers, to devour the vegetable matter, filth and offal that accumulate there; and, being unable to get out, they eventually find their way to these vaults. Here they are killed and eaten by the starving wretches. And would you believe it?—these people derive almost all their food from these sewers. They take out the decayed vegetables and other filth, which they actually eat; and the floating sticks and timber serve them for fuel. You remember the man we saw devouring the dead animal; well, he took that carcase from the sewer.'
'And what effect does such loathsome diet produce upon them?' asked the other.
'Oh,' was the reply—'it makes them insane in a short time; eventually they lose the faculty of speech, and howl like wild animals. Their bodies become diseased, their limbs rot, and finally they putrify and die.'