Читать книгу Knots Untied; Or, Ways and By-ways in the Hidden Life of American Detectives - George S. McWatters - Страница 46

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Another missing instance. A beautiful girl, born in a village on the Sound, where the waters of that inland sea beat, and play around the sandy pebbles of a land-locked inlet, is reared in innocence and virtue, until she reaches her seventeenth year. She is as lovely as the dawn, has had no excitement—but the Sunday prayer-meeting, and her life, peaceful and happy, has never been tainted by the novelty of desire. At seventeen she visits New York for the first eventful time in her life. She is dazzled with its theatres, its balls, its Central Park; the Broadway confuses and intoxicates her, but opera has divine charms for her musical ear, and she is escorted, night after night, by a man with a pleasing face and a ready tongue. She is yet white as the unstained snow. One night they take a midnight sleigh ride on the road, and stop at a fashionable-looking restaurant in Harlem Lane. She is persuaded to take a glass of champagne, and finally to drink an entire bottle of champagne. That night the world is torn from under her feet. She has tasted of the Apples of Death. She returns to her peaceful home, by the silken waves of the Sound, a dishonored woman. To hide her shame, she returns to New York; but her destroyer has gone—she knows not whither. Then the struggle begins for existence and bread. She is a seamstress, a dry-goods clerk, but her shame finds her out when an infant is born to her unnamed. One night, hungry, and torn with the struggle of a lost hope, she rushes into the streets and seeks the river. On a lone pier she seeks refuge from her "lost life." The night-watchman, anxious about the cotton and rosin confided to his charge, does not hear the cry of "Mother" from a despairing girl, or the plunge into the gloomy, silent river below. She is not found for days after, and then her once fair face is knawed threadbare with the incisors of crabs, and the once white neck, rounded as a pillar of glory, is a mere greenish mass of festering corruption. She is not recognized, and thus fills the page devoted to missing people.