She will sing, it no more. She is in a better situation now for a little girl than midnight street rambling; that is not the best school for young girls—we have seen how near the brink of ruin it led Sally Eaton.
She was rescued just in time—just before she was lost. Two great calamities fell upon her in one night. Her father was killed, and her mother's house was burned, leaving the poor widow and her two children in the street, naked, except one garment, amid the crowd that came to look upon what she then thought the wreck of all hope. It proved her greatest blessing; for in that crowd were those who took her in, and clothed and fed, and sent her children to school, and taught her girl how to work; and, finally, placed her as a help to another widow, where she will soon learn and earn enough to help herself. The other girl, who is now working with her old companion, was once her street associate in rags and wretchedness; afterwards, her envied, because better clothed, acquaintance. We saw her too, upon the same evening that we first saw the little Hot Corn girl driven away from her hard seat upon those cold stone steps—less cold than the heart of the great world towards its outcast population. We saw her again, just where we then knew that her course of life would lead her—to intoxication,—wretchedness—crime—prisons, and—no, she stopped just short of death, and returned to virtue, industry, and happiness.
After the heartfelt, happiness-giving congratulations of Mrs. May, Stella, Sally Eaton, and "Brother Willie," were over, I turned to a nice, modest-looking young girl and said, "and who is this? What is your name?"
"Julia Antrim, sir."
Did I dream? No, I did not dream, I looked upon sober reality. It was the poor outcast, whom I had seen dragged away from the underground abode of all that is bad, to "the Tombs," and from whence she went to "the Island," and as I heard, from there, at the expiration of her noviciate, to one of the lowest, most degraded, worse than beastly, abodes of those who have only the form of humanity remaining. So I told her I had heard, and she replied,
"True—where else could I go? I could go nowhere but there. I came out of prison with only the clothes they gave me there, with my hair cropped—branded, to tell all the world to beware of me—that I was a 'prison bird.' If I desired, and I really did, to return to a virtuous life, the door was for ever closed against me. I went back to Mrs. Brown's, the woman who had first tempted me, with fine clothes and jewelry, to sin—to that house where I lost all that a poor girl has on earth—her virtue—where I had sinned and profited, as the term is, by sinning; where I had left piles of rich clothing, and pretended friends. I knocked at the door, once so ready to open for my first admission, and that too was closed in my face with an oath, a horrid, wicked woman's oath, bidding me to go away or she would send a policeman—I knew the policeman would do her bidding—to take me away as a common street vagrant, coming there to disgrace a 'respectable house.' I went away, dispirited, broken-hearted, and sunk down into that wretched abode in Anthony street, where I was found by Mr. Pease, and actually compelled, much against my will, to go to the Five Points House of Industry, where I was washed, and clothed, and fed, and sobered, furnished with work, and, above all else, taught to love God and pray, and, for the first time in more than two years, to feel one moment of happiness.
"When I was with those wretches in that miserable hole where Mr. Pease found me, I really thought that my heart had got so bad, that it could not, would not, ever be good again.
"How I did use to curse and hate everybody that was good. That good man who saved me at last, I hated worse than all others. All who are like what I was then, hate him and fear him more then they do all the prisons and police in the city. If somebody would publish the truth, or only half the truth, of what I alone know of the crime and misery about the Five Points of New York, and how much good all the good men have done who have devoted themselves to the reformation of those wretched human beings, I do think that everybody with a good heart would buy the book, and thus contribute a mite to aid the good work—a work that saves from a life worse than death, scores of children and young girls, lost to every virtuous thought or action; lost to all hope in life or eternity.
"Oh, sir," and she seized me by the hands in her energy, "you can write—Stella has told me how you can write—that you have written some powerful stories; pray write more, more, more; the world will read, and it will do a world of good."
"Well, Julia, if I write, I must have characters and names, to fill up the incidents of my Life Scenes, shall I use yours?"