"But, sir," says benevolence in a drab bonnet, "you have hurt the child."
"What if I have? She has no business in the way. She is nothing but a hot corn girl; they are no better than beggars and often are little thieves. Why don't she stay at home?" Sure enough. Simply because necessity or cruelty drives her into the street. Now your cruelty will drive her home to be beaten by a drunken father, for your act of wanton carelessness.
Stand aside, my little sufferer, or you will be run over again. Here comes a little dark skinned, black-eyed, black-haired man, with life and death in his very step.
What magic power impels him forward. He is a Jew—a dealer in second-hand clothes. Surely his business cannot be so important that he need to upset little children, or step on the gouty toes of slow-going old gentlemen, in his hurry to get forward.
It is Friday night, his Sabbath has already commenced, he can do no business—make no monish—to-night. He is not in a hurry to reach the synagogue, that is closed, what then? He has a Christian partner, and he wants to arrange a little speculation for to-morrow. He has just received information of a shipment of yellow fever patients' clothing, which will arrive to-morrow or Sunday, and he wants his Christian partner to look out on Saturday; on Sunday, the Jew will watch the chance to buy the infected rags, which both will sell on Monday at a hundred per cent profit.
"What, at the risk of human life? Oh, I can believe that of a Jew, but certainly no Christian would do it."
There spoke the Christian reader. The Jew will say the same, only reversing the character. No good Christian or Jew either will do it; yet it will be done, and little beggar girls will be run over in the hot haste to meet the coming ship.
Walk on. The side-walks are crowded, and the street between the curb-stones full of great lumbering omnibuses and carriages, that go up and down all night for hire; but there is a melancholy stillness in all the houses where wealth and fashion, in our young days, lived in lamp-lighted parlors, and diamonds flashed down upon the listener to music which had its home in these gay dwellings, where happy looking faces were seen through open windows. Iron shutters close them now, and commerce wears a dark frown by gas light.
On the right is Wall street, where fortunes are made and lost as by the turn of a card, or rattle of a dice box. It is very thronged at noon day. It is very dull now. A few watchmen tread slowly around the great banking houses, working for a dollar a night to eke out a poorly paid day, by guarding treasures that the owners would not watch all the live long night for all the watchman is worth. But he must watch and work; he has a sick wife at home, and four little girls are growing up to womanhood and city life. God knows for what!
A few express wagons, and more of these ever-going ever-coming omnibuses, are coming out of Wall street to join the great Broadway throng. And a pale-faced little girl sits upon the steps of the Bank of the Republic, adding to that constant cry, "Hot corn! Hot corn!" Now here comes the Cerberus of this money palace. What possible harm to his treasures, can this little poverty-clad girl and her sickly looking little beggar boy brother do, sitting here upon the cold grey, stone steps, with an appealing look to every passer-by to give a penny or buy an ear of corn. Does he think they are merely using their trade to plot mischief and schemes to rob his vaults of their stores of gold? One would judge so by the way he growls at them.