rld.

Madame Restell's clients were all, or nearly all women of the higher
orders of society, and of liberal means. Of this disgraceful fact there
can be no manner of doubt. Her scale of charges was so extravagant as to
positively prohibit her employment by any one unable to pay a handsome
fee for the gratification of their murderous project. Sometimes a poor
girl, ruined by some wealthy libertine, would be supplied by him with
funds to pay for the terrible operation which would conceal her folly;
but in the great majority of cases they were ladies of wealth and social
standing who went dressed in elegant apparel, loaded with jewelry, and
double veiled, to her palatial mansion to obtain her aid.

Madame Restell, whose name was a scandal and her Fifth-avenue house an
outrage upon New York for years, was a native of Painswick,
Gloucestershire. She was the daughter of a humble laborer named Trow,
and first saw the light in 1813. Her educational facilities--as indeed
were all those similarly or even better circumstanced in England seventy
years ago--were of the humblest kind. But she was made to work, taught
to use her needle, and "sent out to service" in her early teens. And so
it came to pass that, at the age of sixteeen, she was "maid of all work"
for a butcher in her native town. She was quite good-looking, with
piercing black eyes and thick, luxuriant black hair, and shapely form.
She had many candidates for her young affections among the young weavers
of the place, but a journeyman tailor named Henry Somers was the
successful wooer. A year or two after the wedding, Mr. and Mrs. Somers
emigrated and came to the city of New York, settling over on the east
side, about Oliver street. Somers was lazy, improvident and a tippler,
and after a short sojourn in America Mrs. Somers found herself a young
and blooming widow, with one child, a girl, to provide for. She had all
along industriously supplemented her husband's earnings by her needle.
She was now wholly dependent upon it for the subsistence of herself and
child.

It was while in these pinched circumstances that she made the
acquaintance of Charles R. Lohman, a printer poor as herself, and became
his wife. There was no immediate improvement in their condition. Both
were impatient of the pinchings of poverty. Neither was constitutionally
disposed to work hard and patiently for an honest competence. The
celebrated "Female Pills" formed the philosopher's stone which relea