Leaving the little one, he returned to the station where the married sister was frantically making inquiries in reference to the traveler and was told that no one, answering that description, had stepped from the train. However the trunk standing there with the child's initials on it made her confident that her sister had arrived and, in some unexplained fashion, had disappeared.
While the controversy with the station-master was going on, a man came up to claim the trunk; and an innocent girl was thus saved from the hands of the procuress, for the house to which she had been taken proved to be a notorious house of ill-fame.
No steps were taken in this case, as in thousands of others, to punish the wrong-doer; the sister dreading the notoriety, which would follow such a case.
We present in this book photographs of "Daisy," who died the day these words are penned. One picture shows her at seventeen in her beauty, "young and so fair." Another shows her dying in the poorhouse before she is twenty, after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering death. The third shows her coffin, if the photographer is successful in snapping it tomorrow as the hearse leaves the undertaker's rooms, for her friends are too ashamed to give her burial from their home. These and all the others in this book are actual photographs, correctly named and in no way made up or misrepresented. The story of Daisy is told over their signatures, by Rev. W. E. Hopkins, formerly a missionary in India, now pastor of the Baptist church at West Pullman, and a worker in The Midnight Mission; and Miss Belle Buzzell who has been for many years a worker in the slums and prisons of Chicago. Miss Buzzell's picture is seen beside the bed of the dying girl. It was "Daisy's" own expressed desire that her death might be life to other girls by its warning.
THE STORY OF "DAISY."
We found her one day in March in the venereal ward at Cook County Hospital. She was unconscious, and it was five weeks before she could tell us her story. One of those great blue eyes was sightless. One hand was crippled. Her lower limbs were paralyzed. She was dying—dying of the horrible, loathsome, putrefying disease of the life of shame.
Poor child! This was the work of but one year of this life and she was not yet twenty years old. During that miserable year of sin, she was ill but recovered sufficiently to resume the service of lust. Then came the break and for long weary months she lay helpless in the resort amidst the revellings of her stronger companions and their consorts—ghastly haunt of the women whose way ends in death.
The madam was kind to her, Daisy told us, and during the long illness at the hospital and later at the poorhouse she visited her frequently, bringing flowers and fruit and supplying her with money for the little delicacies which the county forgets to provide. But she, too, is a woman of sorrow. She is much better than her business and did not mean that her parlor should become a death-chamber. When we told her tonight of Daisy's death she broke down in an agony of tears and for an hour cried out her story of shame, of heartbreak, of regret and remorse, and of longing for home and a worthy life. Yet she is bound for the present and we pray for her deliverance from this partnership with hell, and hope that Daisy's death may be as the touch of the Divine Spirit that shall restore in her the marred image of an exalted Christian womanhood.