Twice I had passed through it, but this was really my first visit to New York; and as I walked about that evening, I began to feel the dread power of the city; the crowds, the lights, the excitement, the gaiety, and all its subtler stimulating influences began to take effect upon me.  My blood ran quicker and I felt that I was just beginning to live.  To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the habit.  It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain, and misery; they would not exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.

As soon as we landed, four of us went directly to a lodging house in Twenty-seventh Street, just west of Sixth Avenue.  The house was run by a short, stout mulatto man, who was exceedingly talkative and inquisitive.  In fifteen minutes he not only knew the history of the past life of each one of us, but had a clearer idea of what we intended to do in the future than we ourselves.  He sought this information so much with an air of being very particular as to whom he admitted into his house that we tremblingly answered every question that he asked.  When we had become located, we went out and got supper, then walked around until about ten o’clock.  At that hour we met a couple of young fellows who lived in New York and were known to one of the members of our party.  It was suggested we go to a certain place which was known by the proprietor’s name.  We turned into one of the cross streets and mounted the stoop of a house in about the middle of a block between Sixth and Seventh Avenues.  One of the young men whom we had met rang a bell, and a man on the inside cracked the door a couple of inches; then opened it and let us in.  We found ourselves in the hallway of what had once been a residence.  The front parlor had been converted into a bar, and a half-dozen or so well-dressed men were in the room.  We went in and after a general introduction had several rounds of beer.  In the back parlor a crowd was sitting and standing around the walls of the room watching an exciting and noisy game of pool.  I walked back and joined this crowd to watch the game, and principally to get away from the drinking party.  The game was really interesting, the players being quite expert, and the excitement was heightened by the bets which were being made on the result.  At times the antics and remarks of both players and spectators were amusing.  When, at a critical point, a player missed a shot, he was deluged, by those financially interested in his making it, with a flood of epithets synonymous with “chump”; While from the others he would be jeered by such remarks as “Nigger, dat cue ain’t no hoe-handle.”  I noticed that among this class of colored men the word “nigger” was freely used in about the same sense as the word “fellow,” and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.