Part 1 (2/2)

This latter person was perfectly unknown to the worthy ladies of the black art profession; he was to them simply an individual, one of the many-headed public, a cash customer, who paid liberally for all he required, and who, by reason of the dollars he disbursed, was ent.i.tled to the very best witchcraft in the market.

And he got it.

He undertook a few short journeys in search of the marvellous; he went on a couple of dozen voyages of discovery without going out of sight of home; he penetrated to the out-of-the-way regions, where the two-and-sixpenny witches of our own time grow. He got his fill of the cheap prophecy of the day, and procured of the oracles in person their oracularest sayings, at the very highest market price. For the business-like seers of this age are easily moved to prophesy by the sight of current moneys of the land, no matter who presents the same; whereas the oracles of the olden time dealt only with kings and princes, and nothing less than the affairs of an entire nation, or a whole territory, served to get their slow prophetic apparatus into working trim. To the necromancers of early days the anxieties of private individuals were as naught, and from the shekels of humble life they turned them contemptuously away.

It is probably a thorough conviction of the necessity of eating and drinking, and a constant contemplation from a Penitentiary point of view of the consequences of so doing without paying therefor, that induces our modern witches to charge a specific sum for the exercise of their art, and to demand the inevitable dollar in advance.

Whatever there is of Sorcery, Astrology, Necromancy, Prophecy, Fortune-telling, and the Black Art generally, practised at this time by the professional Witches of New York, is here honestly set down.

Should any other individual become particularly interested in the subject, and desire to go back of the present record and make his exploration personally among the Fortune-tellers, he will find their present addresses in the newspapers of the day, and can easily verify what is herein written.

With these remarks as to the intention of this book, the reader is referred by the Cash Customer to the succeeding chapters for further information. And the public will find in the advertis.e.m.e.nts, appended to the name and number of each mysteriously gifted lady, the pleasing a.s.surance that she will be happy to see, not only the Cash Customer of the present writing, but also any and all other customers, equally cash, who are willing to pay the customary cash tribute.

CHAPTER II.

Is devoted to the glorification of Madame Prewster of No. 373 Bowery, the Pioneer Witch of New York. The ”Individual” also herein bears his testimony that she is oily and water-proof.

CHAPTER II.

MADAME PREWSTER, No. 373 BOWERY.

This woman is one of the most dangerous of all those in the city who are engaged in the swindling trade of Fortune Telling, and has been professionally known to the police and the public of New York for about fourteen years. The amount of evil she has accomplished in that time is incalculable, for she has been by no means idle, nor has she confined her attention even to what mischief she could work by the exercise of her pretended magic, but if the authenticity of the records may be relied on, she has borne a princ.i.p.al part in other illicit transactions of a much more criminal nature. She has been engaged in the ”Witch”

business in this city for more years than has any other one whose name is now advertised to the public.

If the history of her past life could be published, it would astound even this community, which is not wont to be startled out of its propriety by criminal development, for if justice were done, Madame Prewster would be at this time serving the State in the Penitentiary for her past misdoings; but, in some of these affairs of hers, men of so much _respectability_ and political influence have been implicated, that, having sure reliance on their counsel and a.s.sistance, the Madame may be regarded as secure from punishment, even should any of her many victims choose to bring her into court.

The quality of her Witchcraft, by which she ostensibly lives, and the amount of faith to be reposed in her mystic predictions, may be seen from the history of a visit to her domicile, which is hereunto appended in the very words of the ”Individual” who made it.

The ”Cash Customer” makes his first Voyage in a Shower, but encounters an Oily and Waterproof Witch at the end of his Journey.

It rained, and it _meant_ to rain, and it set about it with a will.

It was as if some ”Union Thunderstorm Company” was just then paying its consolidated attention to the city and county of New York; or, as if some enterprising Yankee of hydraulic tendencies, had contracted for a second deluge and was hurrying up the job to get his money; or, as if the clouds were working by the job; or, as if the earth was receiving its rations of rain for the year in a solid lump; or, as if the world had made a half-turn, leaving in the clouds the ocean and rivers, and those auxiliaries to navigation were scampering back to their beds as fast as possible; or, as if there had been a scrub-race to the earth between a score or more full-grown rain storms, and they were all coming in together, neck-and-neck, at full speed.

Despite the juiciness of these opening sentences, the ”Individual” does not propose to accompany the account of his heroical setting-forth on his first witch-journey with any inventory of natural scenery and phenomena, or with any interesting remarks on the wind and weather. Those who have a taste for that sort of thing will find in a modern circulating library, elaborate accounts of enough ”dew-spangled gra.s.s” to make hay for an army of Nebuchadnezzars and a hundred troops of horse-of ”bright-eyed daisies” and ”modest violets,” enough to fence all creation with a parti-colored hedge-of ”early larks”

and ”sweet-singing nightingales,” enough to make musical pot-pies and harmonious stews for twenty generations of Heliogabaluses; to say nothing of the amount of twaddle we find in American sensation books about ”hawthorn hedges” and ”heather bells,” and similar transatlantic luxuries that don't grow in America, and never did.

And then the sunrises we're treated to, and the sunsets we're crammed with, and the ”golden clouds,” the ”grand old woods,”

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