CHAPTER II.

Madame Flamingo-her distinguished patrons, and her very respectable house.

Regard us forbearingly, generous and urbane reader; follow us undaunted whither we go, nor charge us with tracing crime in a bad cause.  We will leave the old prison, the dejected inebriate, the more curious group that surround him, and the tale of the destroyer it develops, and escort you in our walk to the mansion of Madame Flamingo, who is well known in Charleston, and commonly called the Mother of Sin.  It is a massive brick pile, situate in one of the public thoroughfares, four stories high, with bold Doric windows, set off with brown fluted freestone, and revealing faded red curtains, overlain with mysterious lace, and from between the folds of which, at certain hours of the day, languid and more mysterious eyes may be seen peering cautiously.  Madame Flamingo says (the city fathers all know it) she has a scrupulous regard to taste, and develops it in the construction of her front door, which is of black walnut, fluted and carved in curious designs.  In style it resembles somewhat the doors of those fashionable churches that imitate so closely the Italian, make good, paying property of fascinating pews, and adopt the more luxurious way of getting to heaven (prayer-book of gold in hand) reclining on velvet and satin damask.

The mansion of Madame Flamingo differs only in sumptuousness of furniture from twenty others of similar character, dotted here and there about the little city.  Add to these the innumerable smaller haunts of vice that line the more obscure streets-that, rampart-like, file along the hundred and one “back lanes” that surround the scattered town, and, reader, you may form some estimation of the ratio of vice and wretchedness in this population of thirty thousand, of which the enslaved form one-third.

Having escorted you to the door, generous reader, we will forget the common-place jargon of the world, and affect a little ceremony, for Madame Flamingo is delicately exact in matters of etiquette.  Touch gently the bell; you will find it there, a small bronze knob, in the fluting of the frame, and scarce perceptible to the uninitiated eye.  If rudely you touch it, no notice will be taken; the broad, high front of her house will remain, like an ill-natured panorama of brick and freestone, closed till daylight.  She admits nothing but gentlemen; and gentlemen know how to ring a bell.  Well, you have touched it like one of delicate nerves, and like a bell with manners polished by Madame Flamingo herself, it answers as faintly as does the distant tinkle of an Arab’s bell in the desert.