There was a long delay, which was undoubtedly occasioned by the difficulty of properly providing for those refractory girls, but at last there came a reluctant “Yes.”
Having now got all that his dollar entitled him to, the customer prepared to depart. The Madame informed him that in a few days she would have her “Magic Mirror” from Paris, with which she could do new wonders, and she hoped that he would soon call again, adding, “If I was ten year younger I would not admit gentlemen, but now I am old and I must.”
CHAPTER XIV.
Describes an interview with the “Cullud” Seer, Mr. Grommer,
of No. 34 North Second Street, Williamsburgh,
and what that respectable Whitewasher and
Prophet told his Visitor.
CHAPTER XIV.
A BLACK PROPHET, MR. GROMMER, No. 34 NORTH SECOND STREET, WILLIAMSBURGH.
Besides those who advertise in the daily journals, there are many other witches in and about the city who do not deign so to inform the world of their miraculous powers. Either they have not full faith in their own supernatural gifts, or they distrust the policy of advertising; at any rate they are only known to the inquiring stranger by accidental rumors, and mysterious side-whisperings emanating from those credulous ones who have had ocular proof of the miracle-working facility of these veiled prophets.
In certain of the older States of the Union, there cannot probably be found any country village that does not boast its old crones of fortune-telling celebrity—women who are not named by the awe-struck youngsters of the town, but with low breath and a startled sort of look thrown backward over the shoulder every minute as if in half-fear that the evil eye is even there upon them. And in almost every neighborhood in any part of the country, there will be one or more old women who delight in mystifying the young folks by telling fortunes in tea-cups, by means of the ominous settling of the “grounds;”—or who, sometimes, even “run the cards,” or aspire to read the fates by the portentous turning of the Bible and key. All these conjurations are given without money and without price in the rural districts, but they sometimes work no little mischief.