Another missing instance. A beautiful girl, born in a village on the
Sound, where the waters of that inland sea beat, and play around the
sandy pebbles of a land-locked inlet, is reared in innocence and
virtue, until she reaches her seventeenth year. She is as lovely as the
dawn, has had no excitement--but the Sunday prayer-meeting, and her
life, peaceful and happy, has never been tainted by the novelty of
desire. At seventeen she visits New York for the first eventful time in
her life. She is dazzled with its theatres, its balls, its Central
Park; the Broadway confuses and intoxicates her, but opera has divine
charms for her musical ear, and she is escorted, night after night, by
a man with a pleasing face and a ready tongue. She is yet white as the
unstained snow. One night they take a midnight sleigh ride on the road,
and stop at a fashionable-looking restaurant in Harlem Lane. She is
persuaded to take a glass of champagne, and finally to drink an entire
bottle of champagne. That night the world is torn from under her feet.
She has tasted of the Apples of Death. She returns to her peaceful
home, by the silken waves of the Sound, a dishonored woman. To hide her
shame, she returns to New York; but her destroyer has gone--she knows
not whither. Then the struggle begins for existence and bread. She is a
seamstress, a dry-goods clerk, but her shame finds her out when an
infant is born to her unnamed. One night, hungry, and torn with the
struggle of a lost hope, she rushes into the streets and seeks the
river. On a lone pier she seeks refuge from her "lost life." The
night-watchman, anxious about the cotton and rosin confided to his
charge, does not hear the cry of "Mother" from a despairing girl, or
the plunge into the gloomy, silent river below. She is not found for
days after, and then her once fair face is knawed threadbare with the
incisors of crabs, and the once white neck, rounded as a pillar of
glory, is a mere greenish mass of festering corruption. She is not
recognized, and thus fills the page devoted to missing people.