The Witches of New York

by Q. K. Philander Doesticks

The room was a small square one, shabbily furnished with very few articles of furniture, and these were dimly visible through the snuffy mist which filled the apartment; there was snuff everywhere; there was a snuffy dust on the chairs; there was a precipitate of snuff on the floor, and, if snuff was capable of crystallization, there would undoubtedly have been stalactitic formations of snuff depending from the ceiling; the Madame herself was snuff-colored, as if she had been boiled in a decoction of tobacco.

She is a Frenchwoman, and has had about half a century’s experience of her present fleshly tabernacle, which is somewhat the worse for wear, although from the fossil remains of bygone beauty, still visible in her ancient countenance, her customer inclined to the belief that in some remote age she was comely and pleasant to the eye. He founded this hypothesis upon the brown hair and hazel eyes which time has spared.

In respect to personal cleanliness, the Individual regrets to say that the Madame was not in every respect what a critical observer would wish to see; her hands and arms were in a condition which would naturally lead to the belief that the Croton Corporation had cut off the water; and under each of her finger-nails was a dark-colored deposit, which may have been snuff, but looked like something dirtier. She was dressed in a light striped calico dress, over which was a black velvet mantle trimmed with fur, and on her head was a portentous head-dress which was fearfully and wonderfully made of shabby black lace; her face was in the same condition as her hands and arms, as was also her neck, which was only visible to the upper edge of the collar-bone—further deponent saith not.

She more nearly approached the Cash Customer’s notion of the Witch of Endor, than any other lady he had ever heard mentioned in polite society. She at once prepared for business.

She seated herself behind a small stand, dusty with snuff, on which were a number of little books on astrology, written in French and German, and as dirty and as fragrant as if they had been some kind of clumsy vegetable which had been grown in a tobacco plantation.

She asked her visitor if he spoke French or German, to which he replied that, had he been conversant with all the languages invented at the Babel smash-up, he would on this occasion, for particular reasons, prefer to confine himself to English. He also ventured an inquiry as to terms, upon which she produced a card containing a list of her charges, printed in English, French, and German. He learned from this dingy document that the prices of telling fortunes by lines of the hand, by cards, and by the stars, varied in amount from one to five dollars. The Individual concluded that one dollar’s worth would suffice, and, approaching the little table, he announced the result of his cogitations. The enchantress, who was so saturated with snuff and tobacco that every time her customer looked her in the face he sneezed, then brought a pack of very filthy cards, which were covered over with mysterious hieroglyphics done in black paint. She asked her visitor to “cut” them, which he reverently though daintily did, whereupon she laid them on the table before her in four rows, and spoke, having previously explained that she used no witchcraft but did all her wonders by the signs of the zodiac. The Individual concentrated his attention, and listened with all his ears while the witch of Broome Street spoke thus:

“I will tell you first what these cards indicate, then I will look at the lines of your hand, and then I will answer three questions.”

Here she paused, while her agitated listener sneezed a couple of times; then she resumed, speaking with a strong foreign accent:

“You are good disposition—have excellent memory, you don’t have many enemy, but what you do is of your own sex—you are very frank person and you was born in the sign of the Crab. You have some lucky days which are Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays, whatever you do on these days is well, but you shall not wash your hair on Thursdays, if so, you will wash all your luck away. You must be very careful of fire and water, you will be in great danger of fire and water and you must be very careful. You may die by fire or water, I cannot say but you must certain be very careful of fire and water. You must also be very careful of dogs, very careful of dogs, you may die by a dog, but you must certain be very careful of dogs.”

Here she paused again, and while her visitor was meditating on the full force of what he had heard, and was inwardly resolving to go immediately home, shoot Juno, and drown her as-yet-unoffending-but-in-after-days-dangerous-to-his-peace-of-mind-and-the-happiness-of-his-life pups, she prepared for the second portion of her discourse.