ness to her. On Monday morning she opened her eyes to the plea sant light that shines on the earth-but had she remained in incar ceration, it is probable that she would have opened them to the lurid flames that flash in hell.

A third gentleman from her native place being in the city, called on her at the hotel, and afterwards, in company with the officer, or the other merchant, visited the president of the Magdalen society, by whom she was furnished with board in a genteel family. She rewarded Mr. Tappan in giving to him the vial of laudanum-a reward his wholesale slanderers, the pretended guardians of public morals, might envy that Christian philanthropist.

In her private retreat she had leisure to review her conduct, her wrongs, her condition, and her future prospects. Passing by other causes of affliction, the thought of being cast off by her friends oppressed her. She wrote to her parents, and told them the history of her elopement and misfortunes, and begged that they would receive her once more, if it was but as one of their lowest menials. After she sent the letter it occurred to her that she could not enjoy the society of her once familiar associates, as their remarks and flings slander's barbed arrows-would exceedingly ruffle her feelings. Then she concluded to remain in New York. For a few days she appeared to be willing to abandon the hope of regaining her former standing in society. It was a consoling reflection to her, that she could, in this city, not only live by the avails of her honest industry, but also acquire a circle of virtuous friends among the middle class of citizens-the people among whom is the stamina of virtue. But the time when the two gentlemen, both merchants from her neigh borhood, were to start for home, was at hand, and her philosophic fortitude fled before the revival of her local and filial attachments. She resolved to return home with them, relying on the hope that her presence at the feet of her parents would plead her cause more pow erfully than letters. The merchants felt a lively interest for her wel. fare, and desired her to hold up her head as high as ever, and assured her that she should find parents in them, if her own refused to receive her.

This lady had seen the origin and triumph of prostitution, in the gayest circles in the city haunts of the licentious, and the female friend with whom she resided, on the sabbath previous to the day on which she left the city, accompanied her to the prison and hospital at Bellevue, that she might see its decline and end. She was present in the female penitentiary, at the sabbath school established in it last winter (1830), by a benevolent society for the suppres sion of vice, and there heard her own history related by the superintendent, who, at that time, did not know that she was the person of whom he was speaking. Tears flowed down her cheeks in streams. He supposed that it was sympathy for the ruined girl that caused them to run so freely. At the close of the school, in which she acted as a teacher, her friend accompanied her to the Magdalen asylum. There she saw females that had fallen, laboring to ascend the hill of virtue, and through a Redeemer's blood to pluck the laurel of purity that flourishes in unfading bloom on the holy hill of the hea

venly Zion. At the asylum, in a conversation with the matron and chaplain, she acknowledged the obligations of religion, and the pro priety, importance, and duty of attending immediately to the great salvation purchased by the blood of the Son of God.

An expression of the chaplain reminded her of that saying of her pretended lover, "My little girl, remember you are far from home. I am the only friend you have in this city. My pleasure is your law." And then tears watered her bright eyes, and a sigh heaved her bosom, and her head fell towards the earth. She remained in that situation a moment, and then placed one hand on her side, and rested her forehead in the palm of the other. The arm of the chair supported the elbow of the hand that held her head. Her body gently rocked in irregular lines, and her tongue uttered in a low, but melting tone, My misfortune was not voluntary. I was deceived, and deserted, and betrayed. I will die sooner than yield to an infamous life. I know not how to testify my gratitude to the president of your society. His kind attentions to me are not merited." "Its true, replied the chaplain, that you are indebted to him, but much less however than you are indebted to God for disposing the president's heart to aid you. To God you are indebted for your deliverance from the fangs of your keeper in that abode of pollution in the city, and you once believed it. It would be base, to be sure, to forget the secondary agents of your escape.

And

But let me now invite your attention to other considerations. Perhaps you know that the residence of a female in that house renders her while in it liable to an arrest, as a vagrant, and without benefit of judge, jury, or counsel, to an mprisionment in that vicious school and hospital of loathsome disease-the penitentiary at Bellevue. Had Jehovah been deaf to your prayer, in the chamber of your imprisonment, it at the most would have been but a few months before that old woman, the keeper of that house, would have opened her doors and put you into the street, and retained your jewels and clothes too. Then, these things having happened, you would wander about the city ashamed to be seen by the virtuous, and jeered at and cursed by the very fellows you saw at that house. You would have no home, but the street and the penitentiary; for the alms-house was erected for the virtuous poor, though it's too true that it is a retreat of the residue of brothels. then you would mingle in the dance and in the revelry of those low holes you saw the other day at the Five Points, in which negroes and sailors, and hospital convalescents, and foreigners, and citizens, and countrymen, commingle in riots, and drunkenness, and theft, and murder. There the alderman would seize you, and the police magistrate would commit you for sixty days to the penitentiary. And when the term of your imprisonment had expired, it would be but a few days at most, before you would find yourself again in prison, and again out of it, until, like some now in it, you would have entered it the eighteenth time, and served out at least sixty days at each commitment. And that you could not escape this routine, is probable from the fact that many of the females you saw there, have often been discharged one morning and recommitted the next, so that their presence from the sabbath school has not been lost by

their liberation. Some of these women have spent several years in the penitentiary, not having any other place to which to go. Now you may picture to your mind your situation in prison. Confined with twenty-five or fifty women, dressed in coarse sail or tow cloth, in one room at night, without fire or light, or bed, or pillow, or bundle of straw, or heap of shavings, or leaves, with an allowance of one short narrow blanket filled with vermin for a covering, you would lie down like the swine, side jammed to side, and limb matted in limb, to sleep on the naked, cold, dirty floor. In the morning, at day-light, you would be called into that long workshop in which the sabbath school is held to pick oakum or to sew. There a man with a cowhide often walks the floor to preserve peace. And there your day's labor would be sold by the authorities for five cents. No friend could call on you. And there, as you well know, the law provides no matron to win your affections, gain your confidence, commanding your respect, enforce your obedience, train you to habits of industry, economy, cleanliness, neatness, propriety in conduct, and chasteness in conversation and deportment.

An intelligent, pious, humane matron you would not have there daily to instil into your mind the pure principles of our holy religion, to dispel your despair, to sooth your sorrows, to bind up your wounded spirit, to revive your hopes, to restore your love of character, and to strengthen your resolution to return no more to prodigal living. But you would daily and nightly associate with the old hardened offender, intelligent in well concerted plans of wickedness she is ever busy in communicating. There too is loud laughter, ridicule, and solemn mockery of all that is good and lovely. Add to this the licentious songs, ribaldry, blasphemy, bitterness, reproach, and fighting of the inmates of your night room, and tell me if these things would not expel from your mind every serious reforming thought, and dislodge your imagined firmness of purpose to live virtuously after the term of your imprisonment had expired. Ah! your mind would be educated in the science of crime, and hardened in iniquity; your moral feelings would be sunk to the lowest abyss of moral depravity; your bones would be filled with pain, and your joints be stiffened by lying on the floor. But why do I call it a penitentiary? I ought to ask pardon of the commissioners of the state, who designate it by its more appropriate title, A COLLEGE OF VICE." Indeed it is impossible to name a worse school of criminality than it is. It is a nuisance, a sink of iniquity, corrupting at the wholesale the public morals. It has never reformed an individual convict. In vain you search its records for an instance in which it has attained the intention of the law. And under its present regulations, it, in the nature of things, never can secure the end of its institution-the reformation of the convicts, the thing signified by its name-the end for which it was erected, and is supported by public funds. Hence it's self-evident that your reformation in it could not be effected. Indeed the keepers of the penitentiary do not expect to see one solitary convict reformed in it. And it is a common belief among them that when a girl has once entered it, that she will soon enter it again. And this belief of theirs is rational. It is founded on a careful observation of the effects of that No. 1. JAN. 1832.

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school of vice on the prisoners with whose care they are charged. And it is not in their power, or in that of the corporation, to obviate this result, the present plan of the building, and the present moral treatment, of the convicts remaining the same. That penitentiary ruins hundreds of chaste women whose salvation by proper treatment could easily be secured. Facts prove this. Look, there sit two females brought to ruin by it. And to convince you more fully that it is useless to hope for reform in it, notice these two facts: That municipal concern, in retaining the woman but sixty days, cannot, even with that system of discipline and arrangements which should be adopted and executed, secure the destruction of corrupt principles and habits, or the inculcation of good ones. Years, and in some cases the remainder of life, are necessary to attain those desirable ends which the law contemplates. The other is this. It makes no provision for the future employment and support of the convicts; and it is impossible for the convicts to do it themselves. The law provides no means to prevent them from returning directly to the places whence they were sent to prison. Indeed it is a common practice in this city for the keepers of vile women to have, on the morning some fifteen or fifty women are discharged from the penitentiary, six or eight hacks and stages, and sometimes clothing too, at the penitentiary-gate where women are picked up and wheeled to the Five Points, or to other infamous sinks of iniquity. There the same women are not unfrequently seen the same evening lying drunk in the street. Now they are more corrupt and better skilled in the art of thieving and kindred vices than they were prior to their imprisonment. They are harpies let loose on the property and morals of the public. This view of the case shows why the daily papers of the city record so many instances of petty thefts, for by transferring this picture of these degraded females, to the males sent to the male penitentiary, you will at once perceive their case is a counterpart to that of these abandoned women.

Moreover, should it be your lot to enter the hospital, and to waste away by sickness like the females you saw there, no brighter hope of reform could dawn on your mind. That is the hospital of the city brothels, and it is by tax supported, for what? Why, to cure the diseased that they may return again to their wickedness doubly skilled in the mysteries of abominations. And I would that our naval, military, alms-house, and other hospitals, were not polluted by this defiling, destroying demon; for when they discharge their convalescent subjects, (for it is not possible to retain them until they are perfectly sound, as the multitude of new subjects in a worse state must occupy the hospital wards,) these convalescent persons, for want of a better place, return to the places whence they came.

Now, madam, if the merciful providence of God to you had been withheld, it is suicide or murder alone that could have saved you from the fate of the women you saw in that penitentiary. If ever woman had reason to praise, love, and obey the Lord for his goodness and his tender mercies, surely your are that woman.

Indeed sir, replied the lady, uncomfortable, loathsome, debasing, and corrupting as that penitentiary is, it would have been a palace to

me in comparison with that house in this city to which the stranger sent me, though it was furnished in a style more superb than any gentleman's parlor I have seen in New York.

During all this interview there was something about the lady that awakened sympathy in her behalf. Her polished manner, her elegant figure, her posture, her looks, her beautiful sallow countenance, her moistened eyes and cheeks, her modesty, her plaintive tones, her self-reproaches for her credulity and folly, and her intense grief, added an interest to her story, and spread an irresistibly captivating charm over her as she sat in the New York Magdalen Asylum bewailing her misfortunes. And there too is something in the magnanimity and purity of her mind and actions in her imprisonment, that elevates her character, and commands our reverence. We pardon her for one offense and charge her to sin no more, while the base act of the man who was so destitute of moral principle, of the honor of a gentleman, of the common sympathies of our nature, as to rob the maiden he wooed of the innocence of virtue, and then to desert her to the viler artifices of his companion, and to the insolence and the imprisonment of a city hag, that excites an abhorrence of him and of his accessory, and of the hag, the revulsion of indignant feeling is inadequate to stigmatize. And what better character can the secondary agents in degrading the female sex have, or how is it possible a virtuous woman whose price is above rubies, or the affectionate wife who is a crown to her husband, can stoop so low as to speak to those who live in the habitual practice of this evil? And here, assuming as a fact that there are in New York one thousand vicious families, each of which annually furnishes but one case like this, each parent and child that reads this is asked who are the candidates for these brothels? And in your answer bear in mind that of the cities in the Union whose fame is sullied by the utter abasement and slavish degradation of this mercenary vice, that the city of New York is but one city.

Let virtuous females guard their reputation as the tree of Eden is; for when a female has even inadvertently taken one improper, though not a vicious step, it is seldom that she learns the happy art of retrieving it with dignity. Having committed herself, that commitment often becomes the first link in a series of actions that stains the character and blasts the fairest prospects that ever opened to the eye of youth. Let young ladies beware how they furnish even an apparent ground for the imputation of crime. Moreover, let young gentlemen earnestly and conscientiously covet a character unsullied even by the charge of entertaining seductive intentions. When all young men will covet such a peerless reputation, annals will groan no longer under the accounts of war, or Magdalen asylums be needed.