There
were too many of her sort in the Five Points eager for the position
of mistress to this man who treated them as a sultan might treat the
meanest of his concubines, rarely throwing them a word, and
alternately indulgent and brutal. They regarded him with awe, even
forgetting to drink when, in certain stages of his cups, he
entertained by the hour in one or other of the groggeries a circle of
the most abandoned characters in New York--thieves, cracksmen,
murderers actual or potential, "shoulder-hitters," sailors who came
ashore to drink the fieriest rum they could find, prostitutes, dead-beats,
degenerates, derelicts--with a flow of talk that was like the
flashing of jewels in the gutter. He related the most stupendous
adventures that had ever befallen a mortal. If any one of his
audience had heard of Munchausen he would have dismissed him as a
poor imitation of this man who would seem to have dropped down into
their filthy and lawless quarter from a sphere where things happened
unknown to men on this planet. They dimly recognized that he was a
fallen gentleman, for at long intervals good churchmen from the
foreign territory of Broadway or Fifth Avenue came to remonstrate and
plead. They never came a second time and they usually spent the
following week in bed.
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