med in her
delightful southern home. First-rate facilities for drugging a
man into a state of crazy madness are offered at the bar across
the way; he may swill himself into a condition of beastly
stupidity with lager beer from next door below; he may be
pleasantly poisoned by degrees with the drugged alcohol, in
various forms, which is sold next door above; or he may be more
speedily disposed of with a couple of doses of "doctored" whiskey
from the festering den just round the corner. Lucrezia Borgia was
a novice, a mere babe in toxicology. New York wholesale liquor
dealers could teach her the alphabet in the fine art of slow
poisoning. She would no longer need the subtle chemistry of the
Borgias; she could learn of them to poison wholesale and to do
the work by labor-saving machinery.

Johannes, resolved that if he should marry the astrologist he
would move out of the neighborhood, and take a house in a cleaner
part of the city, for he felt that if he had to do even the
courting here, he would have to fumigate himself after every
visit to his lady-love as though he had just come out of a
yellow-fever ship. He knew that if he should chance to meet the
Health Officer in the street after a two hours' stay in that
locality, that trusty official would, from the unhealthy smell of
his coat, quarantine him for forty days, and put him up to his
neck in a barrel of chloride of lime every morning.

But a full-fledged Cupid is a plucky animal, and not easily
killed by anything no more tangible than smell, and the
particular Cupid that had possession of the voyager's heart came
of a long-suffering breed, and was equal to almost any emergency.
So as Johannes did not feel his ardent passion die, or even turn
sick at the stomach, he thought he could manage to get through.
If he couldn't get along any other way, he could fill his pockets
with brimstone matches, and his boots full of blue vitriol. Or
he could carry a bunch of Chinese fire-crackers in his hat, and
touch them off on the sly whenever he felt himself in need of a
healthy smell. Then he could wash himself all over in lime-water,
and drink a quart or so of some liquid disinfectant every time he
came away. So he went ahead.

Madame Carzo, the Brazilian interpreter of Yankee fate and
fortunes, lives in the third story of the house No. 151 Bowery,
with her sister, a girl of about fifteen years of age. The two
occupy themselves with plain sewing, except when the Madame is