The Cry of a Victim
There’s eight dollars gone! If I thought it was the last time I should be cheated, I shouldn’t mind it; but I know it isn’t. In this case it was friendless eighteen—female eighteen—sole support of widowed mother and an indefinite number of small children, and all that; got her money, and turned out a humbug. I hope the recording angel will remember that in my favor. Not to speak of the man who rushed into the area to tell me that he had just had a baby—I mean that his wife had—and that they needed everything; when I immediately scooped up an armful of whatsoever I could find; and, thanking me with grateful tears, he hastened to pawn them for rum. Then there was the gifted but unfortunate artist, who had been sketching at the White Mountains and wished me to “lend him” a greenback to carry him home, because he had read my books, and because he wanted it, and because there was not another person in the world of whom he could possibly ask such a favor; oh, no! Then there was the man who looked like the ten commandments on legs, and must see me, if only a few moments; whose sepulchral errand turned out to be a desire to sell me some Furniture Polish, which I bought to get rid of him, and which, when uncorked a few days after, caused the family to rush into the street without the usual ceremonial hat and bonnet. Then there was the interesting child whom I brought in to feed and warm, who helped himself to several things without leave while I was looking for others. And there was the old gentleman who sent me an illegible MS. story to read and get published; whose i’s I dotted, and whose t’s I crossed, and for whom I furnished commas and semicolons and periods ad libitum; whose grammar I touched up, and whose capital letters in the wrong place I extinguished; and who abused me like a pickpocket because the Editor to whom I sent it thought that Dickens or Thackeray wrote quite as well as he. Then there was the young man with a widowed mother, for whom I wore out several pairs of boots “getting him a situation;” who used to lie in bed till noon, and go to it when it didn’t rain, and spend all he earned in cherry-colored cravats.
Now, I’m going to stiffen myself up against all this sort of thing in future. I’ve done giving pennies to the little street-sweepers to buy cream-tarts with. I hand no more hot buckwheat cakes through the grating of my basement window to red-nosed little boys with ventilator trousers. I buy no more pounds of lucifer matches from frowsy-headed women at the area door, or “Windsor soap” for sweet charity’s sake, knowing it to be only common brown, with a counterfeit label. I shall turn sternly away from the Liliputian venders of flimsy boot-lacings and headless shawl-pins. I wish it distinctly understood that I have no use for corset-lacings, or home-made pomatum, or questionable “Lubin” perfumes in fancy bottles.
I have looked upon the humanitarian side of the question till I don’t know whether to be most disgusted at my own credulity, or the perfidy of my fellow-creatures. Now let somebody else take a turn at it.
A Hint To Organ-Grinders.—It is a curious fact that organ-grinders prefer to select for their purpose that house whose windows are ornamented with statues or flowers. There is philosophy in this; since the lady who is fond of beauty and of sweet perfumes, is also fond of music. And though some of our street strains are sufficiently wheezy and harrowing, yet much of it also is sweet and soothing, and suggestive of past luxurious evenings, and of happy faces, and of hours that flew all too swiftly. But alas! for the uplifted pen, with its suspended drop of ink, at such moments! Alas! for the printer’s devil waiting on one leg in the hall! Why won’t organ-grinders learn where scribblers abide?