The reasons for my preference are easily explained. Governor Johnson, unlike many other lawyers who have attained prominence as practitioners in the criminal courts, does not desert his clients after he has secured their acquittal. To me he has proved a friend in need and in deed at the darkest hours of my life. He knows my character thoroughly; he has defended me more than once; and that I have not fallen into graver crimes than those which I now confess with shame, is due to his wise, fatherly counsels, and to the fact that he first implanted in my breast the desire to reform my life.
Nor is my case a solitary instance. His great brain is no less quick to conceive than is his great heart to execute. His quiet charity is as unostentatious as it is far reaching and comprehensive, and the number of those who owe their reformation to his patient, untiring efforts, will be known only when the secrets of all hearts are revealed.
THE GAMBLING HOUSES OF NEW YORK.
Despite the fact that there is upon the statute books of New York a stringent law against gaming, the great American metropolis has been called—and not unjustly—the very paradise of gamblers. It is said, by carping critics, that there is scarcely a street without its gambling resort, all private, of course, yet the location of which is well known to those who indulge in that excitement.
The favorite game—as all over the North American continent—is faro, and the stakes vary according to the class to which the house belongs in which the game is played. In some of the lowest hells a stake of five cents is not despised. These houses are frequented by the poorest working men, discharged soldiers, broken down gamblers and street boys. In this connection it may be said, that of all the street boys in the world perhaps those of New York are most precocious. It is no uncommon sight to see a shoe-black, scarcely three feet high, walk up to the table or “bank,” as it is euphoniously termed, and stake a nickel with the air of a young spendthrift to “whom money is no object.”
At any of the later hours of the night, in any one of the cheap eating houses which abound in or near Broadway, from Spring Street north to Tenth Street, can be found one or more shabby-genteel men who bear unmistakable evidence in their speech, manner and appearance, of long continued, and generally disastrous, “fighting with the tiger.” These are the canaille of gamblers, who hang precariously on the edge of a terrible fascination, and manage to supply the necessities of life in a cheap way, from chance success in small bets and by a few dollars picked up by guiding more profitable customers to the houses where they are known. Strictly speaking, there are more “cappers” than gamblers. They are not only at the bottom of the “profession,” but their right to the proud (?) title of “sporting men” is stoutly denied by their more prosperous and reputable brethren of the green cloth. Improvident, uncertain in habits and language, unscrupulous, they are the natural products of sporting life, but which the faro banks nevertheless strive, although in vain, to shake off. Every house has several of these forlorn attaches, who play when they have money, and introduce a desirable stranger when they can; who are constant in their attendance upon the banquets that are daily spread in these houses, but are thus obliged to take the chances as to lodgings, and raiment. When they have worn threadbare the hospitality of the gaming house-keeper (as sometimes happens), they subsist—God and themselves alone know how.
Very different in most respects is another class of gamblers who can be seen any fine afternoon decorating Broadway with the splendor of their apparel, for, as a rule, the sporting fraternity is unexcelled in elegance of attire. If you meet in Broadway a man who lounges listlessly onward as though he had no well-defined object in life, and whose garments are cut in the latest style and of the finest material, you may wager he is a gambler in good luck, provided his silk hat is in the highest possible state of polish and his watch chain unusually massive. Very elegant in appearance, very quiet and gentlemanly in their demeanor, are these professional sports of the better class at all times and in all places. Gamblers of this type are usually men of intelligence far above the average, and among the hundreds of men eminent in science, literature and art who flock to the high-toned hells of New York, it is no easy task to find greater brilliancy of wit, higher polish of deportment, or more geniality of manner than are exhibited by the dealers at first-class metropolitan gaming-houses.
In the Bowery and on the side streets, may be met professionals of a very different class; brazen-faced men, with bristly mustaches and hair closely cropped like a convict, with apparel obtrusively gaudy and loaded with jewelry apparently of gold and precious stones. These are men to be avoided as the sharks which their appearance and their every act proclaim them to be. They are proprietors of, or “steerers” for the third-rate dens, where a “square” game is never played, even by accident. Should faro fail to return a profit, these fellows are ready to try anything else, from a game of poker down to outright robbery, as a means of obtaining money. Honest labor they abhor and despise. Any man, they say, can make a living by work, but it requires a smart man to get it without. They cherish a deep and abiding conviction of their own shrewdness; and their egregious conceit sometimes leads them to attempt some one of the confidence games in which “skinners” are adepts, in the perpetration of which they usually ingloriously come to grief through their native clumsiness. When they have no small dens of their own, their chief occupation and main reliance is as “ropers in,” and in view of their uncouth, repulsive appearance and address it is surprising that they are as successful as they are in enticing strangers into the wretched holes where they can be fleeced.
These strangers, thus inveigled, come under the name of “occasional players,” and are the vivification of all gambling, whether guided by the better class of ropers into gilded resorts, or by these vampires into the lower cribs. So long as one sporting man wins from or loses to another, no harm is done to the community at large, but no good is done the gamblers. It is the “occasional players” who furnish the means to replenish the faro banks, without which, they would soon be empty; the strangers who play not more than two or three times in their lives are the meat upon which these harpies fatten. It is not singular, that the novice is so apt to try his luck when he has once been induced to enter the gambling house. The universal game is faro; and looks so simple, so safe, so entirely fair, that the chances appear rather in favor of, than against the outside player.
It is made yet more alluring by its surroundings. Nowhere has sumptuous elegance been attained in such perfection as in the first-class gambling saloons of New York. Generally each has a suite of rooms, the largest of which is devoted to faro, with perhaps a roulette wheel in one corner, while others are sacred to short card games, and one is always exclusively used as a banqueting hall. All are furnished without regard to cost, but there is never anything in any of them to offend the most fastidious taste, although there may be sometimes a grim humor in some of the decorations, as is the case in one house where a magnificent oil painting of a tiger is suspended from the wall immediately over the table, so that none of the players can look up without meeting the glaring eye of the beast, which is held to be the presiding deity of the game. But such suggestions as this are very rare, as in general there is nothing anywhere but the faro table to declare the uses of the place. Take that away, and the visitor would imagine himself in the private parlors of a gentleman whose great wealth was fortunately equaled by his refined taste. This delusion would be strengthened by a seat at the banquet, where the viands are of all possible varieties, and the best quality, and are served with a finished elegance in the plate and all table appointments, including the waiters, which are not exceeded even in the most select private houses. At the table and on the sideboard in the saloon are liquors of excellent quality, which, although freely offered, are never pressed upon the visitor, and it is possible for a man to frequent these resorts for years without acquiring a taste for liquor. There is, in fact, very little drinking in them, and none at all of that fast and furious potation which hurries so many thousands of Americans to physical, mental and moral ruin. No sight is rarer in a first-class gaming house than to see a man maudlin drunk. An intoxicated man is never allowed to profane the place. If he appears in the person of a valuable patron, he is quietly led away, to be put to bed in some remote room; but if he comes as an unknown casual he is put into the street with little ceremony but without violence.