PROSTITUTES. SAILORS. 53 



and in kind tones to each other, and I heard no loud profanity 

 or ribaldry at all. Whether this was owing to the presence 

 of the police I cannot say, but I am sure it would be impos 

 sible to find, in America, vice, shame, and misery so entirely 

 unassociated with drunkenness or excitement and riot. They 

 were not as young as girls of the same sort in the streets of 

 New York, and in the strong gas-light their faces seemed 

 expressive of a quite different character ; generally they were 

 pensive and sad, but not ill-natured or stupid. It occurred to 

 me that their degradation must have been reached in a dif 

 ferent way, and had not brought with it that outcasting from 

 all good which they would suffer, with us. As they stood, 

 companioned together with each other, but friendless, some 

 with not even hats to protect them from the rain, others, with 

 their gowns drawn up over their head, and others, two to 

 gether, under a scanty shawl, it would have been difficult, I 

 thought, for a woman, who is always found most unforgiving 

 of her sister s sin, not to have been softened towards those 

 abandoned thus to seek support of life that night. We could 

 not but think the kind words with which the sailors recog 

 nised and greeted them, as the ships hauled near, were as 

 much dictated by pity and sympathy as by any worse im 

 pulses. They said, &quot; If nobody else cares for you, we do.&quot; 

 If nobody else ; s waiting to welcome us, we know that you 

 will be glad that we are coming to the land once more, so, 

 cheer up, and we will help each other again to enjoy a short 

 space of jollity, excitement, and forgetfulness. 



There is a benevolent enterprise on foot here for shipping 

 these victims of frailty by wholesale to Australia. A 

 strange way, it seems, to think of peopling a new Anglo- 

 Saxon world ; but who is prouder of his ancestry than your 

 Virginian, whose colony, it is thought, was originally fur 

 nished in much the same way with mothers ? The fact that 



5* 



