In the beautiful bay of Portland, at night—the last night of June, eighteen hundred and thirty-nine—a noble steamer swung at her moorings, pawing the water most impatiently, and spouting smoke and steam from her great nostrils. There was confusion, such as was never known before the days of invention; carriages turning over; people of all classes and ages, on shore and on board, hurrying to and fro. When bedlam was in its zenith—legs breaking, oaths in plenty—the bell rung out the chime of the inferno and away she went.

Out on the sounding sea and in a thronging multitude—the salt spray anon dashing furiously up against the gunwale of the vessel—there moved a stately female figure, seemingly alone. It was the ill-fated subject of these memoirs. Her countenance wore an expression of resoluteness seldom to be seen on the features of woman. Her feet had never trod the deck of a steamboat before, and now, for the first time, her eyes feasted on the sight of ocean. Listlessly, and as if enwraped in spirituality, she gazed on the surging waves. They were crested by the silvery moonlight, each frolicksomely chasing the other, and collectively presenting the appearance of a steel-clad host rushing into battle. Maria was filled with the deepest awe. Words were utterly inadequate to express her emotion. This was that mighty, boundless, fathomless ocean of which she had heard and dreamed so much. It kissed Arabian sands, and sighed its lullaby to a thousand islands, and roared in terror, and lashed the icebergs around the pole! Often and often, in earlier years, had her fancy covered its surface with armed genii in their tiny skins, and with birds of sparkling plumage; a thousand hymning echoes from a thousand sources enchanted the ear. Now all things were trooping fantastically; now they vanished in a twinkling. Peris weaving hair and song and coral; old Neptune careering in the plenitude of power; great serpents snapping their tails: whales swallowing and vomiting Jonahs; these, and many more, were the themes of legend and story which thrilled her nature with wonder and delight! Oh, not as then did her soul now drink from the fountains of pleasing, alluring anticipation and fairy nonsense! Pennyless, forsaken, friendless, in the undulating world; an ardent and a confiding heart already scorched by the living embers of despair, Maria had a part to play in the unknown future, which the genius of a conqueror could not execute or comprehend. A man is brave and bold because he is armed and strong; but where is the man who can or ever did surmount the difficulties and trials which beset the pathway of an unprotected female, whose bark is launched on the precarious tide of a sensual, selfish, scoffing, devilish world? Not all the heroes of all the Greeks and Romans subdued a foe so terrible, as mankind to woman! I have said she was pennyless. When the steward of the boat dingled his bell, giving notice for “all who had not paid their passage to walk up and settle,” she sent word to the Captain requesting an interview. Shortly he came, when, in a most affecting manner, she expressed her inability to pay her fare, and implored his generosity to allow her to pass without charge. He assented, conducted her to a state room, and told her to take courage and sleep without sadness. Generous man! thought she, some of nature’s noblemen are yet living; and with gratitude and prayer she undressed and went to bed. Sleep soon came to her eyelids, for she was weary. But scarcely had sleep veiled the memory, before a portly, well dressed man, stealthily entered the room without a light, took off his clothes and crawled into the same bed! She waked not until his arms were firmly clasped around her form. Then she uttered a scream, but amid the tremendous noise of the boat’s machinery and the dash of the waters, that cry was drowned. She struggled furiously to get away from his grasp, but failed. Then he put his lips to her ear and whispered, “A free passage; you are without money, and I have an abundance; be quiet, and all shall go well with you.” Her brain was confused; her mouth was dum. She felt that her hour had come. He accomplished his purpose, and remained with her through that long, bewildering night.[6]

Gaily broke the morning, and with its coming the boat landed at Foster’s wharf, in Boston. Maria had already risen. She went out, and up the stairway to the promenade deck, to look at Boston. The world seemed new to her. It was not that abode of honor, nor of love, nor of joy, which the years of her fancy had painted it. Boston! to her, a great and wonderful city. How much she had heard of Boston. It was before her, but she did not dream about it now as she had done so many, many times before, when her imagination played upon its hundred spires or traced it through and through. Her eye now drank the great reality, and the confused roar which she heard, and the still greater confusion of human beings and animal, which she saw, with the uneven, smutty-looking buildings, and the narrow avenues which threaded its pulsating heart, made her tremble. Oh! for a friend or a beggar to guide her footsteps. While in this state of uncertainty, a cab driver approached her, and very politely inquired if she wished to be taken to any part of the city? His pleasant and obliging demeanor gave her encouragement, and she frankly explained to him that she was here a stranger; that she must find a boarding house and secure a frugal sustenance by labor. At this he smiled and said “Certainly, step into my cab, and I will find you a good place without difficulty.” She assented; and the cab driver, sure of his prize, drove rapidly from the wharf, as a low and heartless laugh burst from the throats of a gang of starched loafers standing near, who knew both the purposes of the driver and the circumstances of the previous night.

Through winding streets and cross lanes, by sudden turns and jumbles, they drifted along. Now, cabby was in Washington street, amid a sea of trucks and horses, huge omnibusses and small fry, groping as in the dark; now he dashed through another street, on the west side of which spread out, like a moss carpet, the Common; the broad, the beautiful, the world-famed Boston Common. Then a turn was made, and Maria thought that they were going back to the very wharf they had left. But he soon bore off to the right, over by a large brick edifice, standing on an eminence and commanding one of the loveliest prospects which creation affords. As she saw it, through a pane in the cab door, she almost forgot her destitute situation and her sorrows. Passing this, they descended a hill, and at length cabby halted before a house in Lowell street. It was a house of ill-fame. The character of its inmates were of course unknown to her; her heart was even gladdened by the light of a bevy of gay faces at the window. As she alighted on the pavement, a raven, so unusual in that place, darted by so close to her that its pinions brushed the ribbons of her bonnet. She entered the house and was familiarly but respectfully welcomed, saying all the while in her bosom, “Thank God, it is well at last.”

Oh, conjurings of innocence, thy web is woven with threads of chalk—the morality and uprightness of this world! The wolf howls at thy philosophy and is hungering! Dream not of the world’s honor, nor seek disinterestedness among men; for thou wilt not find it. Hearken no more to the seductive accents of friendship; they flow from polluted lips; in them the devil chants thy requiem. Hate and curse and shun the Race; in that and that only is there protection and safety.

The seraglio of vice into which Maria had thus been cast, was daily and nightly visited by men of all grades. Came there the banker in silk stockings; the improvident sailor, just from the wave; the artisan, with the pittance of toil; the sucker-sharp, whose swindlings and lies are the wages of prostitution; the students of Harvard; the silver-haired deacon of the church of God; yea, EVEN THE PREACHER, RIGHT FROM HIS PULPIT, FLUSHED WITH WINE AND LUST![7] Came there the men of the South, ardent as a southern sun could make them: reckless men, who dashed about the country, lavishing the coffers wrung from the blood of slavery. And they not only, but likewise the pomatum beetles and butterflies of Europe, the spawn of an imbecile aristocracy, who are the scavengers of death and hell in every age and clime.

Days, days, days! Whether of pleasure or of pain, how noiselessly they steal away, and leap from the juttings of Time. Say what you will: let theologians crack their skulls in harrowing up proofs to the contrary: we are the creatures of circumstance. Take the fair maiden, in the bloom of a life of promise; how long ere the mirror will proclaim to her the coming of that signet of waning years, the first grey hair? And upon each of us there is written a destiny—a fate. We may put forth our human might and throw up barriers against the tide, it availeth not; we are swept into the lap of that destiny at last.