To find adventure and danger the rural visitor did not have to seek out the Bowery and the adjacent streets to the east and west.  Adroit rogues were everywhere.  Bland gentlemen introduced themselves to unwary strangers.  Instead of the mining stock or the sick engineer’s story of our more enlightened and refined age, these pleasant urbanites resorted to the cruder weapon of blackmail.  The art was reduced to a system.  Terrible warnings were conveyed to the innocent country-side by the chronicler in such sub-heads as “A Widower Blackmailed,” “A Minister Falls among Thieves,” “Blackmailers at a Wedding,” “A Bride Called On.”

Darkly the investigator painted the gambling evil of the New York of the sixties.  The dens of chance were in aristocratic neighbourhoods and superbly appointed.  Heavy blinds or curtains, kept drawn all day, hid the inmates from prying eyes.  Within, rosewood doors, deep carpets, and mirrors of magnificent dimensions.  The dinner table spread with silver and gold plate, costly chinaware, and glass of exquisite cut:  the viands embracing the luxuries of the season and the wines of the choicest.  “None but men who behave like gentlemen are allowed the entree of the rooms” is the naive comment.  “Play runs on by the hour, and not a word spoken save the low words of the parties who conduct the game.  But for the implements of gaming there is little to distinguish the room from a first-class club-house.  Gentlemen well known on ‘change’ and in public life, merchants of a high grade, whose names adorn charitable and benevolent associations, are seen in these rooms, reading and talking.  Some drink only a glass of wine, walk about, and look on the play with apparently but little curiosity.  The great gamblers, besides those of the professional ring, are men accustomed to the excitement of the Stock Board.  They gamble all day in Wall and Broad Streets, and all night on Broadway.  To one not accustomed to such a sight, it is rather startling to see men whose names stand high in church and state, who are well dressed and leaders of fashion, in these notable saloons, as if they were at home.”  Conspicuous among the keepers of the gambling hells was John Morrissey, who had begun life as the proprietor of a low drinking den in Troy, and as a step in the march of prosperity, had fought Heenan, the Benicia Boy, for the championship of Canada.  He was a personality of the city of the sixties.  The author of the curious volume thought it necessary to tell of his career as he told of the career of A.T.  Stewart, and Henry Ward Beecher, and the particular Astor of the day, and the particular Vanderbilt, Fernando Wood, and Leonard W. Jerome, and George Law, and James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and Daniel Drew, and General Halpin, and half a dozen more of the town’s celebrities.