Notwithstanding my strict attention to my own interests, I have been rather sorely dealt with by fate, upon several occasions, where, so far as I could see, I was vigilantly doing everything in my power to keep myself out of trouble or danger. I may as well relate one of them, merely as an illustration of how little value a man's intellect may be, when fate and the prejudices of the mass of men are against him.
One evening late, I myself answered a ring at the bell, and found a small black boy on the steps, a shoeless, hatless little wretch, with curled darkness for hair, and teeth like new tombstones. It was pretty cold, and he was relieving his feet by standing first on one and then on the other. He did not wait for me to speak.
"Hi, sah, Missy Barker she say to come quick away, sah, to Numbah 709 Bedford Street."
The locality did not look like pay, but it was hard to say in this quarter, because sometimes you found a well-to-do "brandy-snifter,"--local for gin-shop,--or a hard-working "leather-jeweller,"--ditto for shoemaker,--with next door, in a house no better or worse, dozens of human rats for whom every police trap in the city was constantly set.
With a doubt, then, in my mind as to whether I should find a good patient or some mean nigger, I sought out the place to which I had been directed. I did not like its looks; but I blundered up an alley, and into a back room, where I fell over somebody, and was cursed and told to lie down and keep easy, or somebody, meaning the man stumbled over, would make me. At last I lit on a staircase which led into the alley, and, after some inquiry, got as high as the garret. People hereabouts did not know one another, or did not want to know, so that it was of little avail to ask questions. At length I saw a light through the cracks in the attic door, and walked in. To my amazement, the first person I saw was a woman of about thirty-five, in pearl-gray Quaker dress,--one of your calm, good-looking people. She was seated on a stool beside a straw mattress, upon which lay a black woman. There were three others crowded close around a small stove, which was red-hot,--an unusual spectacle in this street. Altogether a most nasty den.