It is here your child of ignorance and neglect is fascinated and made to drink the first cup of death; it is here your faltering sister falls; it is here your betrayed daughter seeks revenge; it is here your forlorn, outcast sufferer first feels the world her enemy, has no sympathizing sister to stretch out the hand of encouragement, and sinks hopeless in the agony of her meditations.  It is here, alas! too often necessity forces its hapless victims, and from whence a relentless world—­without hope of regaining the lost jewel-hurls them down a short life, into a premature grave.  Your church is near by, but it never steps in here to make an inquiry; and if it chance to cast a suspicious look in now and then, it is only as it passes along to inquire the state of the slave market, of so much more importance is the price of men.  Your common school (a thing unknown, and held extremely dangerous in Carolina!) may be your much talked of guiding star to virtue; your early education is your bulwark against which the wave of vice is powerless; but unless you make it something more than a magnificent theory-unless you seek practical means, and go down into the haunts of vice, there to drag up the neglected child, to whom the word early education is a mystery, you leave untouched the festering volcano that vomits its deadly embers upon the community.

Your homilies preached to pew-holders of fashion, who live sumptuously, ride sumptuously to church of a Sunday, and meekly enjoy a sumptuous sermon for appearance sake, will, so long as you pass unheeded the haunts of vice, fall as chaff before the wind.  You must make “early education” more than the mere motto of future happiness; you must go undaunted into the avenues of want and misery, seek out the fallen child, forbear with her, and kindly teach her how much good there is in its principles, its truths.

Pardon, generous reader, this digression, and keep our arm while we see of what metal are the votaries at the shrine of Madame Flamingo.  “I am-that is, they say I am-something of an aristocrat, you see, gentlemen,” says the old woman, flaunting her embroidered apron, and fussily doddling round the great centre-table, every few minutes changing backward and forward two massive decanters and four cut-glass goblets.  We bow approvingly.  Then with an air of exultation she turns on her centre, giving a scrutinizing look at the rich decorations of her palace, and again at us, as if anxious to draw from us one word of approval.  “Gentlemen are no way sensitive here,” pursues Madame Flamingo, moving again the great decanters, “it’s a commonwealth of gentlemen, you see.  In New York-I dash out there, you know-my house is a perfect palace.  I keep a footman and coachman there, have the most exact liveries, and keep up an establishment equal to my Fifth Avenue neighbors, whose trade of rope and fish is now lost in their terrible love of plush.  I am a woman of taste, you see; but, my honor for it, gentlemen, I know of no people so given to plush and great buttons as our Fifth Avenue parvenues.”