has no friend from whom she can borrow enough money to redeem the clothing, and if it is not taken home she may be arrested as a thief and sent to prison.  She goes away, and temptation lies close at her feet.  It is her extremity and the evil one’s opportunity.  So far she has kept herself pure, but the disgrace of a public prosecution and a sentence to prison are terrible things to contemplate.  She is in peril of her soul.  God help her!

Who is this dressed in rusty black garments and closely veiled, who comes up from the restaurant, one of the convenient and unsuspected entrances to this robber’s den?—­for a “policy-shop” is simply a robbery shop, and is so regarded by the law, which sets a penalty upon the “writer” and the “backer” as upon other criminals.  But who is this veiled woman in faded mourning garments who comes gliding as noiselessly as a ghost out from one of the rooms of the restaurant, and along the narrow entry leading to the stairway, now so thronged with visitors?  Every day she comes and goes, no one seeing her face, and every day, with rare exceptions, her step is slower and her form visibly more shrunken when she goes out than when she comes in.  She is a broken-down gentlewoman, the widow of an officer, who left her at his death a moderate fortune, and quite sufficient for the comfortable maintenance of herself and two nearly grown-up daughters.  But she had lived at the South, and there acquired a taste for lottery gambling.  During her husband’s lifetime she wasted considerable money in lottery tickets, once or twice drawing small prizes, but like all lottery dupes spending a hundred dollars for one gained.  The thing had become a sort of mania with her.  She thought so much of prizes and drawn numbers through the day that she dreamed of them all night.  She had a memorandum-book in which were all the combinations she had ever heard of as taking prizes.  It contained page after page of lucky numbers and fancy “rows,” and was oftener in her hand than any other book.

There being no public sale of lottery tickets in Northern cities, this weak and infatuated woman found out where some of the “policy-shops” were kept, and instead of buying tickets, as before, risked her money on numbers that might or might not come out of the wheel in lotteries said to be drawn in certain Southern States, but chiefly in Kentucky.  The numbers rarely if ever came out.  The chances were too remote.  After her husband’s death she began fretting over the smallness of her income.  It was not sufficient to give her daughters the advantages she desired them to have, and she knew of but one way to increase it.  That way was through the policy-shops.  So she gave her whole mind to this business, with as much earnestness and self-absorption as a merchant gives himself to trade.  She had a dream-book, gotten up especially for policy buyers, and consulted it as regularly as a merchant does his price-current or a broker the sales of stock.