Although Orchard Street is by no means so objectionable a thoroughfare as human ingenuity might make it, still, in spite of its pleasant-sounding name, it is not altogether a vernal paradise. If there ever was any fitness in the name it must have been many years ago, and the ancient orchard bears now no fruit, but low brick houses of assorted sizes and colors, seedy, and, in appearance, semi-respectable. Occasionally a blacksmith’s shop, a paint room, or a livery stable, lower or meaner and more contracted than their neighbors, look as if they never got ripe, but had shrivelled and dropped off before their time.
The street is in a state of perennial bloom with half-built dwellings like gaudy scarlet blossoms, which are ripened into tenements by the fostering care of masons and carpenters with the most industrious forcing; and buds of buildings are scattered in every direction, in the shape of mortar-beds and piles of brick and lumber, waiting the due time for their architectural sprouting.
The house of Madame Clifton is of moderate growth, being but two stories high; it has a red brick front and green window-blinds, and is so ingeniously grafted to its nearest neighbor that some little care is necessary to determine which is the parent stock. It presents a fair outside, is but little damaged by age or weather, and is seemingly in a state of good repair.
A neat-looking colored girl answered the bell, and, showing our reporter into the parlor, asked his business, and if he “knew Madame Clifton’s terms?”
Now when it is understood that fortune-telling is by no means the only, or the most lucrative part of Madame Clifton’s business, it will be perceived that this inquiry had a peculiar significance. Having the fear of libel suits before his eyes, the Individual cannot state in precise and plain terms the exact nature of the business which the colored girl evidently thought had brought him there; he will content himself with delicately insinuating, that if his errand had been of the nature insinuated by that female delegate from Africa, there would have been a “lady in the case.”
Fortunately the Cash Customer had erred not thus, but he made known to the colored lady his simple business.
Learning that he only wanted to have his fortune told by the Madame, and had no occasion to test her skill in the more expensive departments of her profession, the girl appeared to be satisfied of the responsibility of her visitor for that limited amount, and departed to inform her mistress.
The customer took an observation.
The room was a neatly-furnished parlor, a little flashy perhaps in the article of mirrors, but the sofas, chairs, carpet, &c., were plain and not offensive to good taste. A piano was in the room, but it was closed, and its tone and quality are unknown. One curious article, for a parlor ornament, stood in the corner of the room; it was the huge sign-board of a perfumery store, and bore in large letters the name of a dealer in sweet-scented merchandise, blazoned thereon in all the finery of Dutch metal and bronze. This conspicuous article, though mysterious and unaccountable, was not cabalistic, and savored not of witchcraft.
Presently the quiet colored girl returned, and in a low voice, and with a subdued well-trained manner, invited her visitor to follow her; meekly obeying, he was led up two flights of respectable stairs into a room wherein there was nothing mysterious, nor was there anything particularly suggestive except a large glass case filled with a stock of perfumery. What was the propriety of so very many bottles filled with perfumes and medicines did not at first appear; but the assortment of imprisoned odors, and liquid drugs, and the store-sign down stairs, and Madame Clifton, and a certain perfumery store in Broadway, and the proprietor thereof, so tangled themselves together in the brain of the inquirer that he has never since that time been able to disconnect one from the other.