AN UNHALLOWED SPOT.

Evening Star, Issue 3637, 19 October 1874, Page 3

AN UNHALLOWED SPOT.

Snyder ‘ (writing in the ‘ Weekly Herald ’) has been visiting the lodginghouses of the City of Auckland, and gives some of his experiences. We exextract a portion ; —ln the ffrst house we entered—and it was getting on towards midnight at the time—was a room where there were three prostitutes. Not young women, but withered harridans, whose countenances, in whatever image they had been cast, had beeti stamped out of them—battered, maimed and scarrpd—revolting to look ppon, with, scarcely a semblance of humanity remaining to them. These women, to the detective’s inquiries, said they were married, that their husbands were up country, that they had just that moment come into the house, and that they were going away in the morning. 'To all of which the detective said, “ Of course,” and then asked one of them, with a black eye and swollen lips, how long it would take before the Governor of Mount Eden gaol would turn . the key of the gate-lock and let her old man out into the fresh air. I don’t think I ever saw a woman struck so innocent-looking as when this question was placed before her. She didn’t even answer. And the questions he put to the other two

women and the information he imparted to them showed at once how intimately he was acquainted with all their private circumstances and domestic relations in life. From this room we went up a flight of steps to the apartments of life. In one of these—a small room some 12ft by 10ft, were lying on broken stretchers, or on the floor, covered with filthy rags, eight miserable, wretched men ; six of these notorious characters known to the Police Courts as thieves, rogues, vagabonds, irreclaimable drunkards, and 'professional .loafers, One had out of the gaol that day, another a fortnight before. A third had undergone the periaities of more than twenty convictions. The stench of that room was ! intolerable! There was no ventilation,

and. the air so foul as to cause the candle the woman held in her hand to burn with a dim light, and surround the flame with a thick halo. None of these men were undressed : two of them were awake and drunk, and two iin a drunken sleep, their heads hanging over the sides of the stretchers ; and all this in the city of Auckland, with its by-laws heaped up and overlapping each other in such multitude that the casting of a piece of orange peel on the footpath, or a leaky verandah, or for a cabman to be seen off his stand looking for a fare, is made to amount almost to a criminal offence.