The Witches of New York

Her undoubted great misfortunes had touched his tender heart. He would see this suffering Princess – he would tender his sympathy and offer his hand and the fortune he hoped she would be able to make for him. If this was haughtily declined there would still remain the poor privilege of buying a dose of magic, paying the price in current money, and letting her make her own change.

Having matured this disinterested resolve, he proceeded calmly on his journey, wondering as he walked along, whether, in the event of a gracious reception by his Princess, it would be more courtly and correct to kneel on both knees, or to make an Oriental cushion of his overcoat and sit down cross-legged on the floor.

This knotty point was not settled to his entire satisfaction when he reached that lovely portion of fairy-land near the angle of Broome and Thompson streets. The Princess had taken up her temporary residence in the tenant-house No. 513 Broome, which, elegant mansion affords a refuge to about seventeen other families, mostly Hibernian, without very high pretensions to aristocracy.

His ring at the door of the noble mansion was answered by a grizzly woman speaking French very badly broken, in fact irreparably fractured. This grizzly Gaul let him into the house, heard his request to see Madame Bruce, and then she called to a shock-headed boy who was looking over the bannisters, to come and take the visitor in charge.

Two minutes’ observation convinced the distinguished caller that the servants of the Princess were not particular in the matter of dirt.

The walls were stained, discolored, and bedaubed, and the floor had a sufficient thickness of soil for a vegetable garden; at one end of the hall, indeed, an Irish woman was on her knees, making experimental excavations, possibly with a view to planting early lettuce and peppergrass.

A glance at the shock-headed boy showed a peculiarity in his visual organs; his eyes, which were black naturally, had evidently suffered in some kind of a fisticuff demonstration, and one of them still showed the marks; it was twice black, naturally and artificially; it had a dual nigritude, and might, perhaps, be called a double-barrelled black eye. This pleasant young man conducted his visitor to the top of the first flight of stairs, where he said, “Please stop here a minute,” and disappeared into the Princess’s room, leaving her devoted slave alone in the hall with two aged washtubs and a battered broom. There ensued an immediate flurry in the rooms of the Princess, and the customer thought of the forty black slaves, with jars of jewels on their heads, who, in Oriental countries, are in the habit of receiving princesses’ visitors with all the honors. He hardly thought to see the forty black slaves, with the jars of gems, but rather expected the shock-headed youth to presently reappear, with a mug of rubies, or a kettle of sapphires and emeralds, and invite him in courtly language to help himself to a few – or, that that active young man would presently come out with an amethyst snuff-box full of diamond-dust and ask him to take a pinch, and then present him with that expensive article as a slight token of respect from the Princess.

“Not so, not so, my child.”

The great shuffling and pitching about of things continued, as if the furniture had been indulging in an extemporaneous jig, and couldn’t stop on so short a notice, or else objected to any interruption of the festivities.

Finally the rattling of chairs and tables subsided into a calm, and the boy reappeared. He came, however, without the tea-kettle full of valuables, and minus even the snuff-box; he merely remarked, with an insinuating wink of the lightest-colored eye, “Please to walk this way.”

It did please his auditor to walk in the designated direction, and he entered the room, when the eye spoke again to a very low accompaniment of the voice, as if he was afraid he might damage that organ by playing on it too loudly.

The anxious visitor looked for the Princess, but not seeing her, or the slaves with the pots of jewels, and observing, also, that the chairs were not too luxuriously gorgeous for people to sit on, he sat down.

A single glance convinced him that the Princess could have had no opportunity to carry off her jewels from her eastern home, or that she must have spent the proceeds before she furnished her present domicile. An iron bedstead, a small cooking-stove, four chairs, and a table, on which the breakfast crockery stood unwashed, was the amount of the furniture. A dirty slatternly young woman of about twenty-three years, with filthy hands and uncombed hair, and whose clothes looked as if they had been tossed on with a pitchfork, seated herself in one of the chairs and commenced conversation – not in Persian. It was one o’clock, P.M., but she attempted an apology for the unmade bed, the unswept room, the unwashed breakfast dishes, and the untidy appearance of everything. Before she had concluded her fruitless explanation, the boy with the variegated eye suddenly came from a closet which the customer had not noticed and was unprepared for, and said, in winning tones, “Please to walk in this room,” which was done, with some fear and no little trembling, whereupon the optical youth incontinently vanished.

At last, then, the imaginative visitor stood in the presence of royalty, and beheld the wronged Princess of his heart. He was about to drop on his bended knees to pay his premeditated homage, but a hurried glance at the floor showed that such a course of proceeding would result in the ineffaceable soiling of his best pantaloons; so he stood sturdily erect.

Before he suffered his eyes to rest upon the peerless beauty who, he was convinced, stood before him, he took a survey of the regal apartment.

An unpainted pine table stood in the corner, a gaudily colored shade was at the window, and an iron single bedstead upon which the clothes had been hastily “spread up,” and two chairs, on one of which sat the enchantress, completed the list.

The Princess was attired in deep black, and a thick black veil, reaching from her head to her waist, entirely concealed her features from the beholders who still devoutly believed in her royal birth and cruel misfortunes – nor was this belief dissipated until she spoke; but when she called “Pete” to the double-barrelled youth with the eye, and gave him a “blowing up” in the most emphatic kind of English for not bringing her pocket-handkerchief, then the beautiful Princess of his imagination vanished into the thinnest kind of air, and there remained only the unromantic reality of a very vulgar woman, in a very dirty dress, and who had a very bad cold in her head. There was still a hope that she might be pretty, and her would-be admirer fervently trusted that she might be compelled to lift her veil to blow her nose, but she didn’t do it. Then he offered her his hand, not in marriage, but for her to read his fortune in, and stood, no longer trembling with expectation, but with stony indifference, for as he approached her, a strong odor of an onion-laden breath from beneath the veil, gave the death-blow to the fair creature of his imagination, and convinced him that he had got the wrong – Princess by the fist. She looked at him closely for a couple of minutes, and then spoke these words – the peculiar pronunciation being probably induced by the cold in her head.

“You are a badd who has saw a great beddy chadges add it seebs here as if you was goidg to be bore settled in the future – it seebs here like as if you had sobetibes in your life beed very buch cast dowd, but it seebs here like as if you had always got up agaid. – It seebs here like as if you had saw id your past life sobe lady what you liked very buch add had beed disappointed – it seebs here like as if there was two barriages for you, wud id a very short tibe – wud lady seebs here to stadd very dear to you, add you two bay be barried or you bay dot – if you are dot already barried you will be very sood – it seebs here as if you woulddt have a very large fabily – five childred will be all that you will have – you will have a good deal of buddy (money) id your life – sobe of your relatives what you dever have saw will sood die add leave you sobe property – but you will dot be expectidg it add it seebs here as if you would have trouble id getting it, for there will sobe wud else try to get it away frob you – it seebs as if the lady you will barry will dot be too dark cobplexiod, dor yet too light – dot too tall, dor yet very short, dot too large, dor too thid – she thidks a great deal of you, bore thad you do of her, – you have already saw her id the course of your life, and she loves you very buch. There are people about you id your busidess who are dot so buch your friends as they preted to be – you are goidg to bake sub chadge id your busidess, it will be a good thidg for you add will cub out buch better thad you expect.”

Here she stopped and intimated that she would answer any questions that her customer desired to ask, and in reply to his interrogatories the following important information was elicited:

“You will be lodg lived, add you will have two wives, add will live beddy years with your first wife.”

The “Individual” proclaimed himself satisfied, and paid his money, whereupon Madame Bruce instantly yelled “Pete,” when the Eye-Boy reappeared to show the door, and the Cash Customer departed, leaving the Mysterious Veiled Lady shivering on her stool, and exceedingly desirous of an opportunity to use her pocket-handkerchief.

And this is all there was of the Persian Princess. As the seeker after wisdom went away he made one single audible remark by way of consoling himself for his crushed hopes and blighted anonymous love. It was to this effect. “I believe she squints, and I know she’s got bad teeth.”

CHAPTER IV.

MADAME WIDGER, No. 3 FIRST AVENUE

Relates the marvellous performances of Madame Widger, of No. 3, First Avenue, and how she looks into the future through a Paving-Stone

Madame Widger came from Albany to this city about four years ago, and at once set up as an “Astrologer.” She has been a “witch” for a great many years, and has, directly and indirectly, done about as much mischief as it is possible for one person to accomplish in the same length of time. She was a woman of great repute in and about Albany, as a fortune-teller, and was supposed to be conversant with practices more criminal. She at last became so well known as a bad woman, that she found it advisable to leave Albany, after she had settled certain lawsuits in which she had become entangled.

Among other speculations of hers, in that place, she once sued the city to recover indemnifying moneys for certain imaginary damages, alleged to have been done to her property by the unbidden entrance of the river into her private apartments, during one of the periodical inundations with which Albany is favored. By the shrewd management of certain of her lawyer friends with whom she had business dealings, she at last got a judgment against the city, but, owing to some other awkward law complications, it became expedient to change her place of residence before she had collected her money, and the amount remains unpaid to this day.

She then came to this city, and set up in the Sorceress way, and, by dint of advertising, she soon got a good many customers. She now has as much to do as she can easily manage to get along with, is making a good deal of money by “Astrology,” and by other more unscrupulous means; and she is probably worth some considerable property. She is a bold, brazen, ignorant, unscrupulous, dangerous woman. She has some peculiar ways of her own in telling the fortunes of her visitors, and is the only person in the city who professes to read the future through a magic stone, or “second-sight pebble.” Her manner of using this wonderful geological specimen is fully described hereafter.

The “Individual” Visits a Grim Witch, who reads his Future through a Moderate-Sized Paving-Stone.

Disappointed in his fond hope of discovering, in the person of Madame Bruce, an eligible partner, who should bridal him and lead him coyly to the altar, that bourne from which no bachelor returns, the Cash Customer was for many days downcast in his demeanor and neglectful of his person. When he eventually recovered from his strong attack of Madame Bruce, he was not by any means cured of his romantic desire to procure a witch wife. He had carefully figured up the conveniences of such an article, and the sum total was an irresistible argument.

If he could win a witch of the right sort, perhaps she could teach him the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Elixir of Life, and show him the locality of the Fountain of Youth, so that he could take the wrinkles out of himself and his friends, at the cost of only a short journey by rail-road. A barrel or so of that wonderful water, peddled out by the bottle, would meet a readier sale and pay a larger profit than any Paphian Lotion that was ever advertised on the rocks of Jersey. All this, to say nothing of a family of young wizards and sorcerers, who could, by virtue of the maternal magic, swallow swords from the day of their birth, do mighty feats of legerdemain, such as cutting off the heads of innumerable pigs and chickens, and producing the decapitated animals alive again from the coat-tails of the bystanders, to the astonishment of the crowd and the great emolument of their proud dad. Even if these profitable babies should not be natural necromancers, with the power of second sight, and any quantity of “natural gifts,” they must surely be spirit-rappers of the most lucrative “sphere,” capable of organizing “circles,” and instructing “mediums,” and otherwise bringing into the family fund large piles of that circulating medium so much to be desired. Or, even failing this popular gift, they must all be born with some strong instincts of money-making vagabondism. If the girls failed in fortune-telling they would certainly have a genius for the tight-rope, or a decided talent for the female circus and negro-minstrel business; and the boys would be brought into the world with the power of throwing a miraculous number of consecutive flip-flaps – of putting cocked hats on their juvenile heads while turning somersets over long rows of Arab steeds of the desert – of poising their infant bodies on pyramids of bottles, and drinking glasses of molasses and water, under the contemptible subterfuge of wine, to the health of the terror-stricken beholders – or of climbing to the tops of very tall poles without soiling their spangled dresses, and there displaying their anatomy for the admiration of the gazing multitude, in divers attitudes, for the most part extraordinarily wrong side up with very particular care – or, at least, they would be born with the astounding gift of tying their young legs in double bow-knots across the backs of their adolescent necks, and while in that graceful position kissing their little fingers to the bewildered audience.

Under the constant influence of such comfortable and ennobling thoughts, it is not in the elastic nature of the human mind to remain long dejected. In the contemplation of the future glories of his might-be wife and possible family, the “Individual” recovered somewhat of his former gaiety. Remembering that “Care killed a cat,” he resolved that he would not be chronicled as a second victim, so he kicked Care out of doors, so to speak, and warned Despair and Discouragement off the premises.

He attired him in his best, and appeared once more before the world in the joyful garb of a man with Hope in his heart and money in his pantaloons. In fact, so radiant did he appear, that he might have been set down for a person who had just had a new main of joy laid on in his heart, and had turned the cocks of all the pipes, and let on the full head just to see how the new apparatus worked. Or, as if he’d been in a shower-bath of good-nature, and come out dripping.

He also took kindly to that innocuous beverage, lager bier, which was a good sign in itself, inasmuch as he had, for a few days, been drinking as many varieties of strong drinks, as if he’d been brought up on Professor Anderson’s Inexhaustible Bottle, and had never overcome the influences of his infant education.

Seeking out a friend to whom he confided his hopes of a lucrative wife and a profitable progeny, the Cash Customer suggested that they proceed immediately in search of the fair enchantress who was to be his comfort and consolation, for the rest of his respectable life.

Being somewhat disgusted with the result of his visit to the witch with the romantic designation of the “Mysterious Veiled Lady,” he had determined to seek out one on this occasion with the most common-place and every-day cognomen, in the whole list. There being a Madame Widger in that delightful catalogue, of course Widger was the one selected. It is true, she sometimes advertised herself as the “Mysterious Spanish Lady,” but in the judgment of the Individual, the Widger was too much for the Spanish and the mystery.

So Madame Widger was resolved on. Her modest advertisement is given, that the impartial reader may be brought to acknowledge that the inducements to wed the Widger were not of the common order.

“Madame Widger, the Natural-Gifted Astrologist, Second-Sight Seer and Doctress, tells past, present, and future events; love, courtship, marriage, absent friends, sickness; prescribes medicines for all diseases, property lost or stolen, at No. 3 First-av., near Houston-st.”

The slight lack of perspicuity in this announcement seems to be a mysterious peculiarity, common to all the Fortune Tellers, as if they were all imbued with the same commendable contempt for all the rules of English grammar.

The voyager being attired in a captivating costume, and being also provided with pencils and paper to make a life-sketch, with a view to an expansive portrait of his enslaver, whose beauty was with him a foregone conclusion, set out with his faithful friend for the delightful locality mentioned in the advertisement, where the charming Circe, Widger, held her magic court.

He was not aware, at that time, that his intended bride was not a blushing blooming maiden, but an ancient dame, whose very wrinkles date back into the eighteenth century. But of that hereafter.

He was determined to have her tell his “love, courtship, or marriage, absent friends, or sickness,” and to insist that she should “prescribe medicines for property lost or stolen,” according to the exact wording of the advertisement.

The doughty “Individual” trembled somewhat, with an undefined sensation of awe, as though some fearful ordeal was before him – to use his own elegant and forcible language, he felt as though he was going to encounter an earthquake with volcano trimmings.

“It is the fluttering of new-born love in your manly bosom,” remarked his companion.

“Well,” was the reply, “if a baby love kicks so very like a horse of vicious propensities, a full-grown Cupid would be so unmanageable as to defy the very Rarey and all his works.”

Without any noteworthy adventure they kept on their way to the First Avenue, and in due time stood, awe-struck, before the mansion of the enchantress.

After the first impression had worn off, the scene was somewhat stripped of its mysteriousness, and assumed an aspect commonplace, not to say seedy. As soon as the sense of bewilderment with which they at first gazed upon the domicile of the mysterious damsel so favored of the fates, had passed away, they found themselves in a condition to make the observations of the place and its surroundings that are detailed below.

The house, a three-story brick, seemed to have that architectural disease which is a perpetual epidemic among the tenant-houses of the city, and which makes them look as if they had all been dipped in a strong solution of something that had taken the skin off. The paint was blistered and peeling off in flakes; the blinds were hanging cornerwise by solitary hinges; the shingles were starting from their places with a strange air of disquietude, as if some mighty hand had stroked them the wrong way; the door-steps were shaky and crazy in the knees; the door itself had a curious air of debility and emaciation, and the bell-knob was too weak to return to its place after it had feebly done its brazen duty. There was no door-plate, but on a battered tin sign was blazoned, in fat letters, the mystic word “Widger.” The Cash Customer rang the bell, not once merely, or twice, but continuously, in pursuance of a dogma which he laid down as follows:

“It is a mistake to ever stop ringing till somebody comes. The feebler you ring, the more the servants think you’re a dun, and therefore the more they don’t come to let you in – but if you keep it up regularly they’ll think you’re a rich relation and will rush to the rescue.”

So he kept on, and the voice of the bell sharply clattered through the dismal old house, making as much noise as if it suddenly wakened a thousand echoes that had been locked up there for many years without the power to speak till now. If a timid ring denotes a dun, and a boisterous one a rich relation, then must the inhabitants of that cleanly suburb have been convinced that the present performer on the bell not only had no claims as a creditor on the people of the house, but was a rich California uncle, come to give each adult member of that happy family a gold mine or so, and to distribute a cart-load of diamonds among the children.