Madame Leander Lent is one of the most shrewd, unscrupulous, and dirty of all the goodly sisterhood of New York witches. She has so great a run of customers that her doors are often besieged by anxious inquirers as early as eight o’clock in the morning, and the servant is frequently puzzled to find room and chairs to accommodate the shame-faced throng, till her ladyship sees fit to get out of bed and begin the labors of the day. She is then impartial in the distribution of her favors; the audiences are governed by barber-shop rules, and the visitors are admitted to the presence in the order of their coming, and any one going out forfeits his or her “turn” and on returning must take position at the tail end of the queue.
The Fates show no favoritism.
The quarter in which Madame Lent has domiciled herself and her familiars, is by no means in the most aristocratic part of the city. “Mulberry,” is the pomological name of the street, and it has never been celebrated for its cleanliness or for its eligibility as a site for princely mansions. In fact it has been, on the whole, rather neglected by that class of society who generally indulge in palatial luxuries.
Hercules, in his capacity of an amateur scavenger, once attempted the cleaning of the Augean stables, or some such trifle, and his success was trumpeted throughout the neighborhood as a triumph of ingenuity and perseverance. If Hercules would come to Gotham and try his hand at the purgation of Mulberry Street, our word for it, he would, in less than a week, knock out his brains with his own club in utter despair.
There never yet were swine with stomachs strong enough to feed upon the garbage of its gutters, or with instincts so perverted as to wallow in its filth. Dogs, lean and wild-eyed, the outcasts of the canine world, sometimes, driven by sore stress of hunger, sneak here with drooping tails and shame-faced looks, to search for bones, and then, wounded in their self-respect by the very act, they drag their osseous provender to a distance, and upon some sunny mud-heap, dine in dainty neatness. The very pavement is broken into countless hillocks and ruts like waves, as if, in utter disgust at the place and its associations, the street was trying to roll itself away in stony billows. The shattered wrecks of worn-out drays and carts stand forsaken in the street, keeping each other dismal company, while an occasional shackly wheelbarrow makes the place look as though, after some monstrous fashion, it were a lying-in hospital for poverty-stricken vehicles, and the wheelbarrows were the new-born children, decrepit even in their babyhood. The houses in this pleasant vale have a disheartened tumble-down look, and give the impression of having been originally built by apprentices out of second-hand material. They lean maliciously over the narrow sidewalks, and keep up a constant threatening of a sudden collapse and a general smash of passers-by. If the houses are not dirtier than the street, it is only because every possible element of filth enters into the latter; if they are not dirtier inside than outside, it is because superlatives have no superlative.
Pawnbrokers’ shops are plentiful, kept always by sharp-featured restless Jews, who watch for unwary passers-by like unclean beasts crouching in noisome, dangerous lairs; while bar-rooms yawn in frequent cellars to devour bodily the victims the Jews only rob.
In this, one of the dirtiest streets in this dirty metropolis, directly opposite the English Lutheran Church of St. James, in one of the dirtiest tenant-houses in the street, abideth Madame Leander Lent, the prophetess. Why the mysterious powers didn’t select an earthly representative with a more reputable dwelling-place is a mystery; but there seems to be an inseparable congeniality between prophetic knowledge and concentrated nastiness, utterly beyond all power of explanation. The Madame advises the public of her business in the terms following:
“Astrology.—Madame Leander Lent can be consulted about love, marriage, and absent friends; she tells all the events of life at No. 169 Mulberry-st., first floor, back room. Ladies 25 cents; gents 50 cents. She causes speedy marriage. Charge extra.”
Her customers are much more addicted to love than marriage, so that the wedlock clause cannot be relied on to bring many fish to the net, but it is supposed to give an air of respectability to the advertisement.
The Cash Customer was, perhaps, an exception to this general rule, and feeling that he would on the whole rather like a “speedy marriage,” and wouldn’t so much mind the “extra charge,” he went, in cold blood, with this matrimonial intent to the street, found the number, and heroically entered the house in the very face of a threatened unclean baptism from the upper windows.