"Do! There, that is what you shall do," as I dashed the corn in the gutter. "Go home; tell your mother you have sold it all, and here is the money."
"Wont that be a lie, sir? Mr. Pease says we must not tell lies."
"No, my dear, that wont be a lie, because I have bought it and thrown it away, instead of eating it."
"But, sir, may I eat it then, if you don't want it?"
"No, it is not good for you; good bread is better, and here is a sixpence to buy a loaf, and here is another to buy some nice cakes for you. Now that is your money; don't give it to your mother, and don't stay out so late again. Go home earlier and tell your mother you cannot sell all your corn and you cannot keep awake, and if she is a good mother she won't whip you."
"Oh, sir, she is a good mother sometimes. But I am sure the grocery man at the corner is not a good man, or he would not sell my mother rum, when he knows—for Mr. Pease told him so—that we poor children are starving. Oh, I wish all the men were good men like him, and then my mother would not drink that nasty liquor, and beat and starve us, 'cause there would be nobody to sell her any—and then we should have plenty to eat."
Away she ran down the street towards that reeking centre of filth, poverty and misery, the noted Five Points of New, York.
As I plodded up Broadway, looking in here and there upon the palatial splendors of metropolitan "saloons"—I think that is the word for fashionable upper class grog-shops—I almost involuntarily cried, "hot corn," as I saw the hot spirit of that grain, under the various guises of "pure gin"—"old rum"—"pale brandy"—"pure port"—"Heidsick"—or "Lager-bier"—poured down the throats of men—and ah! yes, of women, too, whose daughters may some day sit, at midnight, upon the cold curbstone, crying "Hot corn," to gain a penny for the purchase of a drink of the fiery dragon they are now inviting to a home in their bosoms, whose cry in after years will be, "Give, give, give," and still as unsatisfied as the horse-leech's daughters.
Again, as I passed on up that street, still busy and thronged at midnight, as a country village at mid-day intermission of church service, ever and anon, from some side-street, came up the cry of "Hot corn—hot corn!" and ever as I heard it, and ever as I shall, through all years to come, I thought of that little girl and her drunken mother, and the "bad man" at the corner grocery, and that her's was the best, the strongest Maine Law argument which had ever fallen upon my listening ear.
Again, as I turned the corner of Spring street, the glare and splendor of a thousand gas lights, and the glittering cut glass of that, for the first time lighted-up, bar-room of the Prescott House—so lauded by the press for its magnificence—dashes our eyes and blinds our senses, till we are almost ready to agree, that first class hotels must have such Five Point denizen-making appurtenances, as this glittering room, shamelessly, invitingly open to the street; when that watch-word cry, like the pibroch's startling peal, came up from the near vicinity, wailing like a lost spirit on the midnight air—"Hot corn, hot corn!—here's your nice hot corn—smoking hot—hot—hot corn."