"Why shines the sun except that he Makes gloomy nooks for grief to
hide? And pensive shades for melancholy When all the earth is bright
beside?"
The words seemed written on the dingy house-tops before me, and borne on the gusty breeze that wafted noxious odors far and wide. My heart turned sick, and yet this was what I had come out to see. I could not have gone away from a lively city like this, where towers and steeples of lofty and majestic buildings reared themselves in proud beauty towards heaven, without having also looked on the picture's gloomy side. Where so much wealth and fashion and finery dazzled the casual eye, there must, said I, be also 'poverty, hunger and dirt,' and were my words not fully verified now?
I have been warned more than once of the danger of going unattended along these haunts of misery and vice, but whether or not it is because my motive is one of pure philanthropy, and my sentiments exclusively sympathetic I do not know, I have, however, escaped up to this without interference from the lowly inhabitants of these obscure corners, and can vouch for the latent gallantry of many a ragged hero, who restored a fallen umbrella or parcel with as much courtesy as his brother clad in broadcloth ever showed me.
That human mind which feasts exclusively upon the dainty morsels of life is only half educated, though there are grand fragments of knowledge and experience to be gathered among the haunts of high art, and where stand the immortal monuments of power and fame, though the heart may swell with a just enthusiasm at sight of the marvels which have risen out of gold piles, the coffers of nations or individuals, I hold that all the majesty of the best-spent wealth has not power to awaken such a depth of feeling in the human breast as one of these tottering huts with its mouldy walls and mud-spattered window-panes, the "Home Sweet Home" of flesh and blood as real and as sensitive as our pampered own.
To think that in the world's great capitals there is squalor which could never compare with what my eyes then beheld! Think of Murray Hill and the Alaska District, Fell's Point, or the Basin, and what a sea of human wrecks we contemplate in a fraction of America's continent alone. And again, think of the waste of wealth the wide world over. Think how vice is wined and dined, and clad in the finest of fabrics, while honest humanity, in helpless hunger, cries out to ears that are deaf and hearts that have turned to stone. Oh, well may it be said that the rich man's chances of heaven are as those of the camel going through the eye of a needle, if the recording angel pencils down the use and abuse of every dangerous penny that might have been well spent, and was not.
With such reflections as these I turned my steps slowly back through the dingy by-ways.
The afternoon was waning, and the hour was near when daily toil would be suspended, and the workers would repair to these their miserable homes. I had met a few already with their picks and shovels on their ragged shoulders, and had stood to see them vanish under these crooked doorways where little children lingered waiting and watching for their cheerless coming. I saw some others lay down the instruments of their honest labor outside the corner entrance of a large but smoky row of wooden tenements that skirted one gloomy street. A doorway cut through the sharp angles of the corner of the building, allowed a small canopy to project in a triangular peak over two dirty battered steps that led into a dimly-lit room on the ground floor. Suspended from the point of the canopy was a lamp of a dull red color, which with rain spatterings and droppings, and a long-standing accumulation of cobwebs and dust had grown barely translucent, and must have emitted but a sickly light at night-fall. A worn and ragged rope-mat lay on the second step, and across the upper half of the dilapidated door (which was of glass) a faded screen was drawn that kept the inner room secure from the curious gaze of passers-by.
Those who had been born and brought up under the shadow of this ominous establishment, must have known many a tale of sorrow and woe that owed its origin to that vile ground-floor.
I discovered, on closer scrutiny, that some faded letters across the dirty lamp, intimated to the general public that this was the "Ace of Spades." And in the money-till of the Ace of Spades, doubtless was the price of many a poor man's toil, the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God knows, without this extra curse.
I shivered as I passed it by, to think that amid such haunts of misery and starvation, a place like this could flourish, growing fat upon the life-blood of famishing humanity, and a pity that is akin to a most contemptuous hatred swelled my breast, when I asked myself: What sort of being presides over this soul-trap? Can it be rational? Can it have a soul? Can it ever understand what even animal sympathy is?