Chapter I: Talk of Dreams 95 (2)

Of course, about election time the excitement was intensified; we had no railroad or telegraphic communication with the outer world, but it was felt that we somehow had the news, and it was known that we had the latest papers from Cleveland, and that our sheet would report the intelligence from them. After all, however, there was nothing very burning or seething in the eagerness of our subscribers. They could wait; their knowledge of the event would not change it, or add or take away one vote either way. I dare say it is not so very different now, when the railroad and the telegraph have made the little place simultaneous with New York and London. We people who fret our lives out in cities do not know how tranquil life in the country still is. We talk of the whirl and rush, as if it went on everywhere, but if you will leave the express train anywhere and pass five miles into the country, away from the great through lines, you will not find the whirl and rush. People sometimes go mad there from the dulness and ennui, as in the cities they sometimes go mad from the stress and the struggle; and the problem of equalizing conditions has no phase more interesting than that of getting the good of the city and the country out of the one into the other. The old-fashioned country newspaper formed almost the sole intellectual experience of the remote and quiet folks who dwelt in their lonely farmsteads on the borders of the woods, with few neighbors and infrequent visits to the township centre, where the church, a store or two, and a tavern constituted a village. They got it out of the post-office there once a week, and read it in the scanty leisure left them by their farm-work or their household drudgery, and I dare say they found it interesting. There were some men in every neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, who, when they called on us, seemed to have got it by heart, and who were ready to defend or combat its positions with all comers; this sort usually took some other paper, too, an agricultural paper, or the New York _Trybune_, as they called it; or a weekly edition of a Cleveland journal. It was generally believed that Horace Greeley wrote everything in the _Trybune_, and when a country subscriber unfolded his _Trybune_, he said, with comfortable expectation, “Well, let’s see what old Horace says _this_ week.” But by far the greater number of our subscribers took no paper but our own. I do not know whether there is much more reading done now on the farms, but I doubt it. In the villages, however, the circulation of the nearest city dailies is pretty general, and there is a large sale of the Sunday editions. I am not sure that this is an advantage, but in the undeniable decay of interest in the local preaching, some sort of mental relish for the only day of leisure is necessary. It is not so much a pity that they read the Sunday papers, as that the Sunday papers are so bad. If they were carefully and conscientiously made up, they would be of great use; they wait their reformer, and they do not seem impatient for him.

In the old time, we printers were rather more in touch with the world outside on the journalistic lines than most of our fellow-villagers, but otherwise we were as remote as any of them, and the weekly issue of the paper had not often anything tumultuously exciting for us. The greatest event of our year was the publication of the President’s Message, which was a thrill in my childish life long before I had any conception of its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, now so universally used by the country papers, originated in the custom which the printers within easy reach of a large city had of supplying themselves with an edition of the President’s Message, to be folded into their own sheet, when they did not print their outside on the back of it. There was always a hot rivalry between the local papers in getting out the Message, whether it was bought ready printed, or whether it was set up in the office and printed in the body of the paper. We had no local rival, but all the same we made haste when it was a question of the Message. The printers filled their cases with type, ready for the early copy of the Message, which the editor used every device to secure; when it was once in hand they worked day and night till it was all up, and then the paper was put to press at once, without regard to the usual publication day; and the community was as nearly electrified as could be with our journalistic enterprise, which was more important in our eyes than the matters the Message treated of.

There is no longer the eager popular expectation of the President’s Message that there once seemed to be; and I think it is something of a loss, that ebb of the high tide of political feeling which began with the era of our immense material prosperity. It was a feeling that formed a solidarity of all the citizens, and if it was not always, or often, the highest interest which can unite men, it was at least not that deadly and selfish cult of business which centres each of us in his own affairs and kills even our curiosity about others. Very likely people were less bent on the pursuit of wealth in those days, because there was less chance to grow rich, but the fact remains that they _were_ less bent in that direction, and that they gave their minds to other things more than they do now. I think those other things were larger things, and that our civic type was once nobler than it is. It was before the period of corruption, when it was not yet fully known that dollars can do the work of votes, when the votes as yet rather outnumbered the dollars, and more of us had the one than the other. The great statesman, not the great millionaire, was then the American ideal, and all about in the villages and on the farms the people were eager to know what the President had said to Congress. They are not eager to know now, and that seems rather a pity. Is it because in the war which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy died, and by operation of the same fatal anomaly the American Plutocracy, which Lincoln foreboded, was born; and the people instinctively feel that they have no longer the old interest in President or Congress?

There are those that say so, and, whether they are right or not, it is certain that into the great centres where money is heaped up the life of the country is drained, and the country press has suffered with the other local interests. The railroads penetrate everywhere, and carry the city papers seven times a week, where the home paper pays its tardy visit once, with a patent inside imported from the nearest money-centre, and its few columns of neighborhood gossip, too inconsiderable to be gathered up by the correspondents of the invasive dailies. Other causes have worked against the country press. In counties where there were once two or three papers, there are now eight or ten, without a material increase of population to draw upon for support. The county printing, which the paper of the dominant party could reckon upon, is now shared with other papers of the same politics, and the amateur printing-offices belonging to ingenious boys in every neighborhood get much of the small job-work which once came to the publisher.

It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, for which no one is more to blame than another, though human nature loves a scapegoat, and from time to time we load up some individual with the common sins, and drive him into a wilderness where he seems rather to enjoy himself than otherwise. I suppose that even if the conditions had continued favorable, the country press could never have become the influence which our editor fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make it. Like all of us who work at all, the country printer had to work too hard; and he had little time to think or to tell how to make life better and truer in any sort. His paper had once perhaps as much influence as the country pulpit; its support was certainly of the same scanty and reluctant sort, and it was without consecration by an avowed self-devotion. He was concerned with the main chance first, and after that there was often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I should not instance him as an exemplary man, and I should be very far from idealizing him; I should not like even to undertake the task of idealizing a city journalist; and yet, in the retrospect at least, the country printer has his pathos for me--the pathos of a man who began to follow a thankless calling because he loved it, and kept on at it because he loved it, or else because its service had warped and cramped him out of form to follow any other.

POLICE REPORT.

One day in summer, when people whom I had been urging to behave in some degree like human beings persisted in acting rather more like the poor creatures who pass for men and women in most stage-plays, I shut my manuscript in a drawer, and the next morning took an early train into the city. I do not remember just what whim it was that led me to visit the police court: perhaps I went because it was in the dead vast and middle of the summer, and the town afforded little other amusement; perhaps it was because, in my revolt against unreality, I was in the humor to see life whose reality asserts itself every day in the newspapers with indisputable force. If this was so, I was fated to a measure of disappointment, for when the court opened this reality often appeared no more substantial than the fiction with which I had lost my patience at home. But I am bound to say that it was much more entertaining, and that it was, so to speak, much more artistically treated. It resolved itself into melodrama, or romantic tragedy, having a prevailing comic interest, with moments of intensity, and with effects so thrilling that I came away with a sense of the highest theatrical illusion.

I.

The police court in Boston is an upper room of the temple of justice, and is a large, square, dismal-complexioned chamber, with the usual seams and cracks configuring its walls and ceilings; its high, curtainless windows were long glares of sunless light, crossed with the fine drizzle of an easterly rain on the morning of my visit. About one-third of the floor is allotted to spectators, and supplied with benches of penitential severity; the remaining space is occupied by a series of curved tables set in a horse-shoe, and by a raised platform, railed off from the auditorium, as I may call it, and supporting in successive gradations the clerk’s desk, on a very long, narrow table, and the judge’s table and easy-chair. At either end of the table on which the clerk’s desk was placed was a bar, representing in one case the witness stand, and in the other the prisoner’s box; midway, the clerk stood within a screen of open iron-work, hemmed in with books of record and tin boxes full of docketed papers.

Outside of the railing were the desks of two officers of the court, whose proper titles my unfamiliarity with the place disables me from giving. They were both well in flesh, as I remember, and in spite of their blue flannel suits and the exercise of a wise discretion, by which one of them had discarded his waistcoat and neckcloth, they visibly suffered from the moist, close heat which the storm outside had driven into the court-room. From time to time one of them cried out, “Silence!” to quell a restive movement in the audience; and once the cravatless officer left his place, and came down to mine near the door, and drove out the boys who were sitting round me. “Leave!” he shouted. “This is no place for boys!” They went out obediently, and some others just like them came in immediately and took their places. They might have been the same boys, so far as any difference for the better in their looks went. They were not pleasant to the eye, nor to any other sense; and neither were the young men nor old men who for the rest formed the audience of this free dramatic spectacle. Their coat-collars came up above their shirt-collars; but, greasy as they were, the observer could not regret this misfit when chance gave an occasional glimpse of their linen--or their cotton, to be exact. For the most part, they wore their hair very short, and exposed necks which I should, I believe, have preferred to have covered. Under the influence of the humid heat, and with the wet they brought from the outside, they sent up a really deplorable smell. I do not know that I have a right to criticise the appearance of some of their eyes--they seemed perfectly good eyes to see with, in spite of their sinister or vacant expression and gloomy accessories; and certain scars and mutilations of the face and fingers were the affair of their owners rather than mine. Whenever they fell into talk, an officer of the court marched upon them and crushed them to silence. “This is no place for conversation,” he said; and the greater part of them had evidently no disposition or capacity for that art. I believe they were men and boys whose utmost mental effort sufficed to let their mouths hang open in the absorption of the performance, and was by no means equal to comment upon it. I fancied that they came there, day after day, the year round, and enjoyed themselves in their poor way, realizing many of the situations presented by experience of like predicaments, more than by sympathy or an effort of the imagination.

I had taken my place among them next the door, so that if my courage failed me at any time I could go out without disturbing the others. One need not be a very proud man to object to classing himself with them, and there were moments when I doubted if I could stand my fellow-spectators much longer; but these accesses of arrogance passed, as I watched the preparations for the play with the interest of a novice. There were already half a dozen policemen seated at the tables in semicircle, and chatting pleasantly together; and their number was constantly increased by new arrivals, who, as they came in, put their round-topped straw hats on one end of the semicircle, and sat down to fill out certain printed forms, which I suppose related to the arrests they had made, for they were presently handed to the clerk, who used them in calling up the cases. A little apart from the policemen was a group of young men, whom I took to be the gentlemen of the bar; among them, rather more dapper than the rest, was a colored lawyer, who afterwards, by an irony of Nemesis, appeared for some desperate and luckless defendants of the white race and of Irish accent. By and by two or three desks, placed conveniently for seeing and hearing everything against the railing on the clerk’s right, were occupied by reporters, unmistakable with their pencil and paper. Looking from them I saw that the judge’s chair was now filled by a quiet-looking gentleman, who seemed, behind his spectacles, to be communing with himself in a sad and bored anticipation. At times he leaned forward and spoke with the clerk or one of the gentlemen of the bar, and then fell back in sober meditation.

Like all other public exhibitions, the police court failed a little in point of punctuality. It was advertised to open at nine o’clock, but it was nearer ten when, after several false alarms, the clerk in a rapid, inarticulate formula declared it now opened, and invoked the blessing of God on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even then there was a long wait before we of the audience heard the scuffling of the feet of the prisoners on what seemed a broad stairway behind the barrier at the judge’s right, and before any of them came in sight they were commanded by the attendant policeman to sit down, and apparently did so, on the top of the stairs. The clerk now turned towards them with a sheaf of the forms which the policemen had filled out in his hand, and successively addressed them by name:--

“Larry McShane!”

“Here, sor.”

“Complained of for being drunk. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty, sor.”

“Pay a fine of one dollar and costs, and stand committed to the House of Industry.”

He jotted something down on the back of each indictment, and half turned to toss it on to his desk, and then resumed the catalogue of these offenders, accusing and dooming them all in the same weary and passionless monotone.

I confess that I had at the time the strongest curiosity to see them, but it has since struck me that it was a finer effect merely to hear their voices in response, and to leave their figures and faces to the fancy. Sometimes the voice that answered “Guilty” was youthful, and sometimes, I grieve to say, it was feminine, though under the circumstances it had naturally that subdued tone which is thought such an excellent thing in woman. Usually, however, the voices were old and raucous, as if they had many times made the same plea in the same place, and they pronounced sir _sor_. The clerk’s sheaf of accusations being exhausted, they all apparently scuffled downstairs again. But a number must have remained, for now, after this sort of overture, the entertainment began in earnest, the actors on the scene appearing as they were summoned from the same invisible space behind the railing, which I think was probably sunk a little lower than the level of the auditorium, and which might, to humor the theatrical illusion, be regarded as the green-room.

II.

The first piece was what I may call a little Police Pastoral, in recognition of the pretty touch of poetry which graced it. A half-grown, baddish-looking boy was arraigned for assault and battery, and took his place at one end of that long table on which rested the clerk’s desk, while a young girl of thirteen or fourteen advanced from the audience, and placed herself at the other end. She was dressed in a well-fitting ready-made suit, which somehow suggested itself as having been “marked down” to come within her means; and she wore a cheap yet tasteful hat, under which her face, as honest as it was comely, looked modestly up at the judge when he questioned her. It appeared that she was passing the apple-stand which the defendant was keeping for his mother, when he had suddenly abandoned his charge, followed her into a gate where she had taken refuge, and struck her; her cries attracted the police, and he was arrested. The officer corroborated her story, and then the judge made a signal to the prisoner, by which it seemed that he was privileged to cross-question his accuser. The injured youth seized the occasion, and in a loud-bullying, yet plaintive tone proceeded as best he could to damage the case against him.

_He_: “Didn’t you pass my mother’s stand with them girls the day before?”

_She_, frankly: “Yes, I _did_.”

_He_: “And didn’t you laugh at me, and call me an apple-woman?”

_She_, as before: “Yes, I _did_.”

_He_: “And hain’t you hit _me_, sometimes, before this?”

_She_, evasively: “I’ve never hit you to hurt you.”

_He_: “Now, that hain’t the question! The question is whether you’ve ever hit me.”

_She_: “Yes, I have--when you were trying to hold me. It was the other girls called you names. I only called you names once.”

_He_: “I want to know whether I hurt you any when you hollered out that way?”

_She_: “Yes, you _did_. And if I hadn’t screamed you _would_ have done it. I don’t suppose you’d have hurt me a great _deal_, but you have hurt _some_ of the girls.”

_The Judge_: “Did he bruise you severely when he struck you?”

_She_, with a relenting glance, full of soft compassion, at her enemy: “Well, he didn’t bruise me _very_ much.”

_The Judge_: “Has he been in the habit of assaulting the other young girls?”

_She_: “He never did _me_ before.” Then, with a sudden burst, “And I think I was every bit as much to blame as he was! I had no business to tease him.”

Here the judge, instead of joining the hands of these children, and sending them forward with his blessing, to dance and sing a little duet together, as would have happened on any other stage, said that he would fine the defendant seven dollars. The defendant gave way to a burst of grief, and the plaintiff, astonished at this untoward conclusion, threw the judge a pathetic and reproachful look, and left the stand in painful bewilderment. I felt sorry for her, but I could not share her pity for the defendant, and my light mind was quickly distracted by the next piece.

III.

I may say here that the features of the performance followed one another rapidly, as at a variety theatre, without any disagreeable waits or the drop of a curtain. If I had anything to complain of it was the swiftness of their succession. I was not yet habituated to this, when I found the scene occupied by the two principal actors in a laughable little interlude of Habitual Drunkenness. A powerfully built, middle-aged Irishman, with evidences of coal-heaving thick upon his hands and ground into his face to the roots of his hair, was standing at one end of that long table, and listening to the tale of the policeman who, finding him quarrelsomely and noisily drunk, and not being able to prevail with him to go home, had arrested him. When he finished, the judge said to the defendant, who had stood rolling his eyes--conspicuous from the black around them--upon the spectators, as if at a loss to make out what all this might be about, that he could ask any questions he liked of the plaintiff.

“I don’t want to ask him anything, sor,” replied the defendant, like one surprised at being expected to take an interest in some alien affair.

“Have you ever seen the defendant drunk before?” asked the judge.

“Yes, your honor; I’ve seen him drunk half a dozen times, and I’ve taken him home to keep him out of harm’s way. He’s an industrious man when he isn’t in drink.”

“Is he usually disorderly when drunk?”

“Well, he and his wife generally fight when he gets home,” the policeman suggested.

The judge desisted, and the defendant’s counsel rose, and signified his intention to cross-question the plaintiff: the counsel was that attorney of African race whom I have mentioned.

“Now, we don’t deny that the defendant was drunk at the time of his arrest; but the question is whether he is an habitual drunkard. How many times have you seen him drunk the past month?”

“About half a dozen times.”

“Seven times?”

“I can’t say.”

“Three times?”

“More than three times.”

“More than twice you will swear to?”

“Yes.”

“Now, I wish you to be very careful, please: can you state, under oath, that you have seen him drunk four times?”

“Yes,” said the policeman, “I can swear to that.”

“Very good,” said the counsel, with the air of having caught the witness tripping. “That is all.”

Aside from the satisfaction that one naturally feels in seeing any policeman bullied, I think it did me good to have my learned colored brother badger a white man. The thing was so long the other way, in every walk of life, that for the sake of the bad old times, when the sight would have been something to destroy the constitution and subvert social order, I could have wished that he might have succeeded better in browbeating his witness. But it was really a failure, as far as concerned his object.

“The question, your honor,” the lawyer added, turning to the judge, “is, what _is_ habitual drunkenness? I should like to ask the defendant a query or two. Now, Mr. O’Ryan, how often do you indulge yourself in a social glass?”

“Sor?”

“How often do you drink?”

“Whenever I can get it, sor.”

The audience appreciated this frankness, and were silenced by a threatening foray of the cravatless officer.

“You mean,” suggested the attorney, smoothly, “that you take a drink of beer, now and then, when you are at work.”

“I mane that, sor. A horse couldn’t do widout it.”

“Very good. But you deny that you are habitually intoxicated?”

“Sor?”

“You are not in the habit of getting drunk?”

“No, sor!”

“Very good. You are not in the habit of getting drunk.”

“I never get dhrunk whin I’m at work sor. I get dhrunk Saturday nights.”

“Yes; when you have had a hard week’s work. I understand that”--

“I have a hard wake’s worruk every wake!” interrupted the defendant.

“But this is a thing that has grown upon you of late, as I understand. You were formerly a sober, temperate man, as your habits of industry imply.”

“Sor?”

“You have lately given way to a fondness for liquor, but up to within six months or a year ago you never drank to excess.”

“No, sor! I’ve dhrunk ever since I was born, and I’ll dhrink till I die.”

The officer could not keep us quiet, now. The counsel looked down at his table in a futile way, and then took his seat after some rambling observations, amid smiles of ironical congratulation from the other gentlemen of the bar.

The defendant confronted the judge with the calm face of a man who has established his innocence beyond cavil.

“What is the reputation of this man in his neighborhood?” inquired the judge of the policeman.

“He’s an ugly fellow. And his wife is full as bad. They generally get drunk together.”

“Any children?”

“No, sir.”

The defendant regarded the judge with heightened satisfaction in this confirmation of his own declaration. The judge leaned over, and said in a confidential way to the clerk, “Give him six months in the House of Correction.”

A wild lament broke from the audience, and a woman with a face bruised to a symphony in green, yellow, and black thus identified herself as the wife of the defendant, who stood vacantly turning his cap round in his hand while sympathizing friends hurried her from the room. The poor creature probably knew that if in their late differences she had got more than she deserved, she had not got more than she had been willing to give, and was moved by this reflection. Other moralists, who do not like to treat woman as a reasonable being, may attribute her sorrow to mere blind tenderness, or hysterical excitement. I could not see that it touched the spectators in any way; and I suspect that, whatever was thought of her escape from a like fate, there was a general acquiescence in the justice of his. He was either stunned by it, or failed to take it in, for he remained standing at the end of the table and facing the judge, till the policeman in charge took him by the arm and stood him aside.

IV.

He sat down, and I saw him no more; but I had no time to regret him, for his place was instantly occupied by a person who stepped within the bar from the audience. I had already noticed him coming in and going out of the court-room, apparently under strong excitement, and hovering about, now among the gentlemen of the bar, and now among friends in the audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and yet he looked like a gentleman--a gentleman in distress of mind; I had supposed that he could not be one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have been allowed so much at large. At the same time that he took his place he was confronted from the other end of the long table by a person whom I will call a lady, because I observed that every one else did so. This lady’s person tended to fat; she had a large, red face, and I learned without surprise that she was a cook. She wore a crimson shawl, and a bonnet abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking colors, and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, impressively swathed in linen; she caressed, as it were, a small water-pitcher, which I felt, in spite of its ordinary appearance, was somehow historical. In fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important part in the assault which the lady accused the gentleman at the other end of the table of committing upon her.

It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a boarder in the house where she was cook, and that he was in the habit of intruding upon her in the kitchen against her will and express command. A week before (I understood that she had spent the intervening time in suffering and disability) she had ordered him out, and he had turned furiously upon her with an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with it, and then had thrown at her head the pitcher which she now held in her hands. There were other circumstances of outrage, which I cannot now recall, but they are not important in view of the leading facts.

Further testimony in behalf of the plaintiff was offered by another lady, whose countenance expressed second-girl as unmistakably as that of the plaintiff expressed cook. She was of the dish-faced Irish type, and whereas the cook was of an Old-World robustness, her witness had the pallor and flat-chestedness of the women of her race who are born in America; she preferred several shades of blue in her costume, which was of ready-made and marked-down effect. This lady with difficulty comprehended the questions intended to elicit her name and the fact of her acquaintance with the plaintiff, and I noticed a like density of understanding in most of the other persons testifying or arraigned in this court. In fact, I came to wonder if the thick-headedness of average uneducated people was not much greater than I had hitherto suspected, in my easy optimism. It was certainly inconceivable why, with intelligence enough to come in when it rained, the cook should have summoned this witness. She testified at once that she had not seen the assault, and did not know that the cook had been hurt; and no prompting of the plaintiff’s counsel could inspire her with a better recollection. In the hands of the defendant’s lawyer she developed the fact that his client was reputed a quiet, inoffensive boarder, and that she never knew of any displeasures between him and the cook.

“Did you ever see this lady intoxicated?” inquired the lawyer.

The witness reflected. “I don’t understand you,” she answered, finally.

“Have you ever known her to be overcome by drink?”

The witness considered this point also, and in due time gave it up, and turned a face of blank appeal upon the judge, who came to her rescue.

“Does she drink,--drink liquor? Does she get drunk?”

“_Oh!_ Oh, yes; she’s tipsy sometimes.”

“Was she tipsy,” asked the lawyer, “on the day of the alleged assault?”

The witness again turned to the magistrate for help.

“Was she tipsy on the day when she says this gentleman struck her with a chair, and threw the pitcher at her head?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the witness, “she was.”

“Was she very tipsy?” the lawyer pursued.

The witness was equal to this question. “Well, yes, sir, she was. Any way, she hadn’t left anything in the bottle on her bureau.”

“When did you see the bottle full?”

“The night before. Or in the evening. She commenced drinking in the night.”

“What was in the bottle?”

“A pint of whiskey.”

“That will do,” said the lawyer.

The witness stepped down, and genteelly resumed her place near the plaintiff. Neither of the ladies changed countenance, or seemed in any wise aware that the testimony just given had been detrimental to the plaintiff’s cause. They talked pleasantly together, and were presently alike interested in the testimony of a witness to the defendant’s good character. He testified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, but where or what I could not make out; he was a college graduate, and it was quite unimaginable to the witness that he should be the object of this sort of charge.

When the witness stood aside, the defendant was allowed to testify in his own behalf, which he did with great energy. He provided himself with a chair, and when he came to the question of the assault he dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He described with vividness the relative positions of himself and the cook when, on the day given, he went into the kitchen to see if the landlady were there, and was ordered out by her. “She didn’t give me time to go, but caught up a chair, and came at me, thus!” Here he represented with the chair in his hand an assault that made the reporters, who sat near him, quail before the violence of the mere dumb-show. “I caught the rung of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinctively pushed it, thus. I suppose,” he added, in diction of memorable elegance, “that the impact of the chair in falling back against her wrist may have produced the contusions of which she complains.”

The judge and the bar smiled; the audience, not understanding, looked serious.

“And what,” said the judge, “about throwing the pitcher at her?”

“I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it in court. I threw no pitcher at her, but retreated from the kitchen as quickly as possible.”

“That will do,” said the judge. The plaintiff’s counsel did the best that could be done for no case at all in a brief argument. The judge heard him patiently, and then quietly remarked, “The charge is dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the next case.”

The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair was going in her favor. She evidently required the explanation of her counsel that it had gone against her, and all was over; for she looked at the judge in some surprise, before she turned and walked out of the court-room with quiet dignity, still caressing her pitcher, and amicably accompanied by the other lady, her damaging witness.

V.

Before she was well out of the door, a lady-like young woman in black was on the stand, testifying against a prisoner, who did not confront her from the other end of the long table, but stood where he seemed to have been seated on the top of those stairs I have imagined behind the railing. He looked twenty one or two years of age, and he had not at all a bad face, but rather refined; he was well dressed, and was gentleman-like in the same degree that she was lady-like. From her testimony it appeared to me that his offense was one that might fitly be condoned, and in my ignorance I was surprised to find that it was taken seriously by the court. She had seen him, from the top of some steps in the shop where she was employed, open a drawer in the book-keeper’s desk, and take out of it a revolver and some postage-stamps; but on his discovering her he had instantly replaced them and tried to make his escape. She gave her evidence in a low voice, and, as I thought, reluctantly; and one could very well imagine that she might have regretted causing his arrest; but it was to be considered that her own reputation was probably at stake, and if his theft had succeeded she might have been accused of it. When she stood aside, the judge turned to the defendant, who had kept quite still, nervously twisting something between his fingers, and questioned him. He did not attempt to deny the facts; he admitted them, but urged that he had immediately put the stamps and pistol back into the drawer, from which, indeed, he had hardly lifted them. The judge heard him patiently, and the young man went on, with something of encouragement, to explain that he only meant to take the things to spite the owner of the shop, on account of some grudge between them, and that he had not realized that it was stealing. He besought the judge, in terms that were moving, but not abject, to deal mercifully with him; and he stood twisting that invisible something between his fingers, and keeping his eyes fixed on those of the magistrate with a miserable smile, while he promised that he would not offend again.

The judge passed his hand to and fro over his chin, and now dropped his eyes, and now glanced at the culprit, who seemed scarcely more unhappy.

“Haven’t I seen you here before?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” I could hardly hear the prisoner assent.

“How often?”

“Twice.”

“What for?”

“Theft,” gasped the wretched creature.

The judge moved in his chair with a discomfort that he had not shown throughout the morning’s business. “If this were the first time, or the second, I should have been glad to let you off with a slight fine. But I can’t do that now. I must send you to the House of Correction.” He nodded to the clerk: “Two months.”

The prisoner remained, with that nervous twisting of his fingers, eying the judge with his vague smile, as if he could not realize what had befallen. He did not sit down till the next culprit rose and stood near him. Then a sort of fatal change passed over his face. It looked like despair. I confess that I had not much heart for his successor. I was sick, thinking how, so far as this world was concerned, this wretch had been sent to hell; for the House of Correction is not a purgatory even, out of which one can hopefully undertake to pray periculant spirits. To be sure, the police court is not a cure of souls; and doubtless his doom was as light as the law allowed. But I could have wished that the judge had distrusted his memory, or taken on his conscience the merciful sin of ignoring it. He seemed very patient, and I do not question but he acted according to light and knowledge. This may have been a hopeless thief. But it was nevertheless a terrible fate. The chances were a thousand against one that he should hereafter be anything but a thief, if he were not worse. After all, when one thinks of what the consequences of justice are, one doubts if there is any justice in it. Perhaps the thing we call mercy is the divine conception of justice.

VI.

It was a thief again who was on the stage; but not a thief like that other, who, for all the reality there was in the spectacle, might have gone behind the scenes and washed the chalk off his white face. This thief was of the kind whose fortunes the old naturalistic novelists were fond of following in fictions of autobiographic form, and who sometimes actually wrote their own histories; a conventional thief, of those dear to De Foe and the Spanish picaresque romancers, with a flavor of good literature about him. Nothing could have been more classic in incident than the story of the plaintiff, an honest-looking young fellow, who testified that he had met the prisoner on the street, and, learning that he was out of work and out of money, had taken him home to his room and shared his bed with him. I do not know in just what calling this primitive and trustful hospitality is practiced; the plaintiff looked and was dressed like a workingman. His strange bedfellow proved an early riser; he stole away without disturbing his host, and carried with him all the money that was in his host’s pockets. By an odd turn of luck the two encountered shortly after breakfast, and the prisoner ran. The plaintiff followed, but the other eluded him, and was again sauntering about in safety, when the eye of a third actor in the drama fell upon him. This was a young man who kept some sort of small shop, and who was called to the witness-stand in behalf of the prosecution. He was as stupid as he could well be in some respects, and very simple questions had to be repeated several times to him. Yet he had the ferret-like instinct of the thief-catcher, and he instantly saw that his look fluttered the guilty rogue, who straightway turned and fled. But this time he had a sharper pursuer than his host, and he was coursed through all his turns and windings, up stairs and down, in houses and out, and gripped at last.

“As soon as I saw him start to run,” said the witness, who told his story with a graphic jauntiness, “I knowed he’d got something.”

“You _didn’t_ know I’d got anything!” exclaimed the thief.

“I knowed you’d get ninety days if I caught up with you,” retorted the witness, wagging his head triumphantly.

As the officer entered the station-house with his prisoner, the host, by another odd chance, was coming out, after stating his loss to the police, and identified his truant guest.

The money, all but thirty cents, was found upon him; and though he represented that he had lawfully earned it by haying in Dedham, the fact that it was in notes of the denominations which the plaintiff remembered was counted against him, and he got the ninety days which his captor had prophesied. He, too, sat down, and I saw him no more.

VII.

Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came forward from some of the back seats, and occupied the benches hitherto held by the plaintiffs and witnesses in the preceding cases. They were of all shades of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and they were there in their solemn best clothes, with their faces full of a decorous if superficial seriousness. I must except from this sweeping assertion, however, the lady who was the defendant in the case: she was a young person, with a great deal of what is called style about her, and I had seen her going and coming throughout the morning in a high excitement, which she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady whose lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine outward roll to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any circumstances; and it may have been light-heartedness rather than light-mindedness that enabled her to support so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all the other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted black walking-dress, with a waist of perhaps caricatured smallness; her hat was full of red and yellow flowers; on her hands, which were in drawing with her lips rather than her waist, were a pair of white kid gloves. As she advanced to take her place inside the prisoner’s bar she gave in charge to a very mournful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and tottering upon little high-heeled boots. The old man lifted the child in his arms, and funereally took his seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned her full-blown smile upon the judge, and confidently pleaded not guilty to the clerk’s reading of the indictment, in which she was charged with threatening the person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment a sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull countenances in the court-room, which had been growing more and more jaded under the process of the accusations and condemnations. The soddenest _habitué_ of the place brightened; the lawyers and policemen eased themselves in their chairs, and I fancied that the judge himself relaxed. I could not refuse my sympathy to the general content; I took another respite from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent myself to the hope of enjoyment from this Laughable After-piece.

The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fullness nor her skin the brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous black.

She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a certain point, and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should hold the beating in store for her, and bestow it whenever she caught her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff, and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had invoked the law.

During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she now flung herself half across it.

“What’d I say I’d whip you _for_?”

_The Plaintiff_, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”

_The Defendant_, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I ast you: what _for_?”

_The Plaintiff_, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”

_The Defendant_: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”

_The Judge_: “She has answered it.”

_The Defendant_, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a ball with my husband ag’in I’d”--

_The Plaintiff_: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”

_The Defendant_: “You didn’t go with him! Ah”--

_The Plaintiff_: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”

_The Defendant_: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket! Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the time,--to church, and everywhere.”

_The Judge_: “That will do.”

The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,” stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her granddaughter-in-law, as no words could have done it. I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage, and living apart from his wife,--a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.

The hapless sire--for this was the character he attempted--came upon the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts--elicited by counsel--to the contrary; and he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account, and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.

“You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”

The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I--I don’ know as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.

“Do you mean that the plaintiff--the person whom your daughter threatened to beat--has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s affections away from her?”

“Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left _me_ to support her.”

“Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s husband away from her?”

“I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter since he married her.”

“Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”

“With who, judge?”

“With the plaintiff.”

“De ol’ woman. No, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: _she’s his gran’mother_.”

“Well, does he go with the young woman?”

“Oh, yes! _Yes!_ He goes with the _young_ woman. Goes with _her_ all the time. That’s the _one_ he goes with!”

He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared his pleasure.

I really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the _dénoûment_, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little drama were of another complexion how finely the situation would have served in a certain sort of intense novel: the patrician dowager, inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and willing to encourage his _penchant_ for the lady of his own rank, whom some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of her husband’s family,--it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.

VIII.