Anybody can be a clerk or a clergyman or a bank president or a teamster. It takes more individuality to strike out in a career like that of the man who works but one week in the year. This man is Santa Claus. His head is covered with a mass of snow-white hair. It falls down over his venerable shoulders and mingles with his equally white beard. The latter falls far down his chest and the old gentleman looks for all the world like the pictures of Santa Claus. Every holiday season he can be found working in some store, posing as the holiday saint, rattling shiny toys before the fascinated gaze of New York’s million children.

Fifty-one weeks in the year he works not at all, and how he subsists and has enough money to buy his little red drinks no man can tell.

The line-up man is a product of New York and of nowhere else. He belongs to a clan of agile, sinewy legged brethren who infest back yards, and his business is to shin up the poles from which are suspended innumerable clotheslines, to fix up frayed out lines, tie on new ropes and get the courtyard rigging into shipshape condition against the Monday wash. He will climb the highest pole in Harlem without the aid of a net and fix your ropes for 25 cents.

“Lady, it is decidedly unsafe to trundle your baby about in that rickety carriage,” is the greeting of the vender of rubber tires for perambulators.

After convincing a startled mother that she has been carelessly subjecting her child to terrible danger from capsizing, the crafty salesman swoops down upon the carriage, tacks on a set of new tires, tinkers up a rickety spoke, slaps a cracked hub together and goes on his way with a merry quarter in his jeans. It’s another odd job.

Take the industrious sellers of keys. They come up to your tenement home, knock at the door and ask whether you need a new key to the chateau. If you have just lost your last key the keyhole genius stoops down, twiddles around with a blank key and some beeswax, files a couple of notches in the blank, and presto—you have a shining new key all for ten cents. A locksmith would take two days and charge you a quarter.

[Pg 237]

Precisely speaking, the man with the camera cannot be included in this list of people who make a living out of curious jobs. Most folks have seen him anchored on a bright corner of a Sunday afternoon taking the pictures of one and all for the small sum of 10 cents.

When you have on your best bib and tucker you strike a dignified pose, with your smaller sister leaning against you, and in two jerks of a lamb’s tail your likeness is slipped upon the post card, which is kept forever after in the family album, where in years to come you gaze upon it and wonder how two such spindly legs supported such a large child.

The man with the telescope doesn’t make a handsome income, and he usually looks unhappy and ill at ease, but for a nickel he will show you the ridges in the moon and the canals on Mars, and if the bulbous top piece of the Metropolitan tower gets in the way it’s your own fault and your nickel is lost.

Next comes what is in reality a woman’s calling, but strangely enough it is followed by a large man with an extremely red face and a stubby mustache. Children must like him because his business is checking them while bargain seeking mammas thread their ways through the aisles of stores.

He stands at the head of a line of baby carriages, soothing his round faced charges and waving a tinkling strapful of ragged edged checks. Upon delivery to him of the check which he gave you when you entered the store you may receive again your baby. No check, no baby, just as in the Chink’s place.

You mightn’t think that a man could eke out an existence selling catnip. One does, though. He stands at an uptown corner with a basketful of cat’s delight, selling it for two cents a bunch, and the old maids in the vicinity make daily trips to his corner. When you’re inclined to growl about your present salary, think of the man selling catnip for two cents a bunch.

Here’s another funny occupation. A man goes around through the sweatshop district mending shoes. If you are a sweatshop employee you generally have one pair of shoes, and of necessity they are on your feet. You can’t leave them with the cobbler when the roof springs a leak or the uppers secede from the lowers. You haven’t time to sit around his shop in your stockings.

[Pg 238]

So this itinerant cobbler hunts you up at your shop, takes off your shoes while you sew and caulks up the seams, tacks on soles and heels, and you pay him with a cheerful smile and some small change.

People who go downtown at night rarely miss seeing the man who advertises various things through an electric sign on his chest. He presses a button at intervals and a light flashes urging you to buy a cigar or a stick of gum or something else. The right thing to say, because everyone says it upon passing this individual, is, “That’s a fine thing for a grown man to be doing.”

Down the bay there is another industry most people never hear of. Enterprising venders owning their own boats meet incoming tramp freighters and sell the crews everything from a pair of mittens to a cough cure. They load their craft with most things you find in a department store and they drive fine bargains with the sailors.

Among the newly arrived immigrants a number of men manage to scrape a living by selling first lessons in English to the strangers struggling with the tongue. These lessons are in the form of simple English sentences followed by the translation in the tongue of the foreigner. Five cents will buy enough assorted conversation to last a new immigrant several weeks.

Under the tinsel, gilt, and colored paper shrine erected before a café in Mulberry Street, just north of the Bend, there is a picture of St. Mary of the Virgin Mount, and the devout who pass by drop their mites into the plates. The clinking of pennies, nickels, and quarters rings fair and true through the medley of sounds which rise from the crowds about the push-carts, and it is music to the ear of Michel Siniscalchi, giver of this year’s festa in honor of the saint.

A year ago they gave a festa in honor of Maria SS. di Monte Vergine, as the placards and lithographs displayed in[Pg 239] the shop windows style her, and it proved a financial failure. It costs money to give a festa—that is to say, a festa of the style and extent which are necessary in doing adequate honor to this saint. In Italy, in the villages from which the people who live about the Bend come, it is customary to have a festa in honor of the saint every year. And it seemed hard when the people who got up last year’s festa decided that they did not again wish to have to shoulder the burden of the festa’s bad debts.

At this time, when everybody else had backed down, Michel Siniscalchi, who deals in colored glass bulbs and similar decorations, stepped to the fore. He said it seemed a shame that they could not honor the saint. Indeed he was so pained by the thought that he would be willing to bear the expenses of the festa himself. He would, of course, furnish all the decorations himself, and his name would appear as president of the comitato on the banners and placards.

This offer was accepted with glee by the men and more especially by the women, who would have taken to heart the loss of a chance to honor their saint. And Michel Siniscalchi set to work to organize his festa. It was, by the way, part of the agreement, that the offerings placed in the saint’s shrine should go to help Siniscalchi.

Colored lights were strung in arches over the narrow street at frequent intervals, banners and yards of bunting draped the house windows, the confetti men and peddlers of fruit and sweetmeats came from blocks around, and on Saturday night the festa opened with much braying of music and no little religious devotion.

The most important decoration was the shrine of the saint’s picture. In a niche of the shrine the picture was placed, and rows of candles were set before it and the tasseled cloth of gold on which it rests. Then there were the plates and certain lithographic reproductions of the picture.

Since Saturday night the festa has held full sway. There is a preliminary celebration in the morning, and then everybody stops until two o’clock in the afternoon. For a brief spell around dinner time, every one but the band rests, and after dinner the people turn out to listen to the music and to gossip. It is a great occasion for gossip, the festa.

At present everybody is talking about the amount of money Michel Siniscalchi may lose by his speculations. The old men sit before the banca across the street from the shrine and[Pg 240] chuckle over his discomfiture, for, while yesterday and Saturday night the coins clinked in the dishes with merry rapidity, now they barely dribble, and, when a clink is heard, by its very novelty it strikes through all other noises.

“Caught,” they chuckle. “Yes, our Michel is caught this time. A cute one, he is. Yes, a cute one, Signor. No, not a politician. But cute, so cute. Ay, and this time he has been caught. Has the signor heard? The signor has but to cross the street and examine the blessed saint’s shrine. ’Tis bare, Signor. Nought but pennies.”

But there are others who are not so sure that Michel Siniscalchi is going to lose by his speculation. Among the younger generation of Italians his scheme is treated with considerable respect, and his Bowery friends wink when Michel’s intelligence is aspersed.

“Lose?” queried Jack Gallagher, sitting with a group of friends in the café behind the shrine. “Lose, did you say? Aw, g’wan. Say, Michel wasn’t born yesterday. He’s got his brains in his head. He’s too rapid for dese wops. Michel’s got a business eye, he has. He’s thinking of advertisin’. See that sign up there? See Michel’s name on it, good and big? See them lights? All from Michel’s store. Aw, he’s a wise guy. He knows his game.”

While Gallagher talked, the infrequent pennies, with an occasional nickel, dropped into the plates, and presently the figure was carried toward Spring Street, with at least 150 women and children and a band in the procession.

“For the last three years I have devoted my summer to making balanced aquariums to order,” said a woman who is now in middle life. “I earn enough by this work to keep me comfortably during the winter, so I call myself a successful woman wage earner.

“I make my aquariums as nearly a perfect reproduction of natural conditions as possible. It is only since the discovery of balanced aquariums that the full decorative effect[Pg 241] of displays of aquatic life has begun to be realized. Now many architects and interior decorators include them in their plans. This is true not only of country places but of many of the newest city homes. Certainly there is no easier and cheaper way to keep some living thing about the house. The care of the balanced aquarium amounts to so little that it may be practically disregarded.

“The cost of the vessel depends entirely upon the wishes of the person who is filling it. It may be an ordinary fruit jar with a wide mouth or a glass tank costing $20 or more. The simplest tanks cost about $1 and are of something more than one gallon capacity. They may be had either rectangular in shape or globular. For an eight gallon tank of domestic glass I have paid as little as $2.50. The main essential is to have a tank perfectly tight and clean, with no paint or other injurious material to contaminate the water.

“To begin with, the water should be as pure as the water we drink. The bottom should be covered with pebbles and sand to the depth of two inches with the plants rooted in it. There is a great variety of aquatic plants that may be had at a cost of from 10 cents to half a dollar a bunch. Of them all fanwort is the most valuable. Hornwort, water starwort, tape grass, water poppy, willow moss, milfoil and a number of floating plants such as lemma, duckweed, salvinia, hydrocharis and hyacinth are among the most important varieties. If one has lived long enough on any water course in the country to know these plants, taking them from their native soil and transplanting them to the sand of the aquarium is a simple matter.

“The most important occupants of the aquarium are the fish, and great care should be taken not to put in too many for the size of the tank. The basis of the balanced aquarium is one fish, say three inches in length, to each gallon of water. If your tank holds five gallons of water you could not make a well balanced aquarium by putting ten fish three inches long in it. If the fish are smaller the number to the gallon can be very greatly increased.

“Gold fish or golden carp are the most popular stock for an aquarium, and the common varieties can be had for ten cents each. This price means the best fish of these varieties. If there is more money to be spent I would advise purchasing some of the really marvellously colored Japanese varieties.

[Pg 242]

“These fish have wonderful flowing tails with colors that change as though by magic from week to week. In the case of the variety known as the telescope fish the color to begin with is velvety black and gradually becomes silvery, then white, and after three years a wonderful orange red. Nearly all varieties of goldfish are constantly changing their colors, which range from black to silver and many shades of amber and golden red.

“There is an almost endless variety of these beautiful Japanese fish to choose from, the more common of which include the fantails, fringetails and comets. Good specimens of these varieties may be bought at from 25 cents to $5 each. The bulgy eyed telescope fish, the aristocrats of the aquarium world, will cost from $5 apiece up, according to size, color, shape and eyes.

“In addition to the Japanese fish there are many other rare varieties suited to balanced aquariums. Among the most popular are the banded tench, the banded sunfish, the paradise fish, the bitterling and the golden tench. Besides these I have orders for many varieties of our own native waters.

“Such orders usually come to me singly, and the one giving the order is quite willing to pay the cost of having his taste suited. These people, usually men, want an aquarium with the fish of their boyhood days. They candidly admit that they wish them as reminders of the happy days long past.

“Where native fish are wanted I usually use sunfish, dace, catfish, minnows, sticklebacks, chub, mirror carp, rockfish, small eels, alligators, newts, frogs and turtles of all sizes and shapes and colors. I always when possible have a snail, tadpole or a few newts in my aquariums, as they are scavengers and will consume much of the decaying matter thrown off by the plants, besides preventing the green scum that will form in still bodies of water.

“Beginners must be particular not to mix their fish indiscriminately. They must always remember that goldfish cannot live in peace with catfish, sunfish, eels, turtles, crawfish, rockfish or sticklebacks. If this rule is not observed, the goldfish will eventually lose the battle for life and be killed.

“Goldfish if properly cared for live to a great age. There is an aquarium in Washington where the goldfish are known to be more than fifty years old.

[Pg 243]

“Balanced salt water aquariums are as easily made and kept as those of fresh water. Of course they must be filled with sea water fresh from the sea and all the inhabitants must be the young of various sea creatures, such as crabs, starfish, shrimps, and anemones. The plant life also must be the varieties that flourish in the sea, and where possible I believe in taking the pebbles and sand from a sea washed beach.

“Beginners must be careful about two points. First, in making aquariums they must not overcrowd them by trying to have too many fish for the volume of water. Second, they must not overfeed their pets. Failure to observe these two rules causes more trouble than all other points connected with the making and care of aquariums.

“In a balanced aquarium the daily care consists in feeding the fish with prepared wafers, dried ants’ eggs, or fish food. Fish should never be fed more than they will eat up clean at the time.

“Fortunately fish are subject to few diseases. The amateur has only to remember that salt water is the cure-all for sick fish. If a fish is out of health and the trouble is caused neither by overcrowding nor by overfeeding, a five minutes bath in salt water every day for a week will in nine cases out of ten restore it to its usual good health and spirits.

“All that is necessary to catch the sick fish is a small net that can be conveniently handled in the aquarium. Though I have been making aquariums of different sorts ever since I was a small country girl, I still use a net and avoid touching the inmates with my hands unless it is positively necessary.

“When I catch my own fish from their native waters I use a small net, very little larger than the one used in the aquariums, and a minnow bucket. These are my only tools.

“I find a ready sale for all the aquariums I have time to make after filling my special orders. Of course there are seasons when the demand is more brisk than others. When those times come I always have a dozen aquariums on hand which I have stocked either for my own satisfaction or to try some new theory.”

Even when Mrs. Alice Stebbins Wells fishes about in her bag and produces her policeman’s star for verification one can hardly believe that she is the famous first “policewoman” of Los Angeles. Scarcely five feet in height, slender, with a mild, almost timorous voice and a pair of very round blue eyes, Mrs. Wells presents an appearance about as formidable as that of a kitten. Yet she has been permanently appointed as a regular member of the police force of a city of 400,000, subject to the same regulations, vested with the same authority, and under civil service, as any male member of Los Angeles’ bluecoat squad. She makes arrests and prefers charges in the same way and with as much success as any policeman, and is a very substantial vindication of the power of personality in an institution where brute force and a six-foot stature have formerly been thought to be indispensable prerequisites. Here is what she says of a phase of police work:

“And do I carry weapons? No, indeed. That is something which I do not feel called upon to do. I am very firmly convinced that under the right conditions a policeman would not have to carry a weapon at all. But before the policeman can give up his gun and his stick, weapons must not be sold indiscriminately to citizens. The only reason now that a policeman requires a weapon is because the other fellow may have one, and the law must enforce its demands against all objection. It is a very sad commentary on our civilization that guns and brass knuckles are displayed openly for sale, and that almost the only restriction in our most careful communities is a provision for a license, which is easily obtained.”

Mrs. Wells is the first woman to be appointed to a police force in any city of the United States. The woman detective, the police matron, the probation officer, the district nurse, are all places which have been filled by women, and were of course the forerunners of the policewoman. But while they were vested with partial police authority their power was greatly restricted along certain well-defined lines, and they did not work in recognized co-operation with the police department.

Before entering her work on the Los Angeles police force Mrs. Wells had been in active training as a social worker. The general attitude which she takes toward that stratum of[Pg 245] society with which she comes most in contact is hinted at in her adaptation of the philanthropist’s, the cheery social worker’s, vocabulary. Mrs. Wells never resorts to the threadbare term of “uplift,” but puts in its place that rather more welcome “upbuilding.”

Returning to California from social work in the East, Mrs. Wells entered upon a scientific study of crime. She became impressed with the importance of the police department in its capacity to prevent crime as well as to punish it, and was convinced of the need of women workers on the inside of the police department to strengthen the emphasis on the side of prevention. She set to work to obtain signatures to a petition for a woman police officer, which resulted very promptly in her appointment to the police force of Los Angeles, where she has been at work for the last three years.

In addition to her regular police duties, Mrs. Wells conducts a bureau of information to which clubs and civic organizations which are working to obtain women on the police force of their home cities may apply. She is now on a six months’ leave of absence, not only to investigate conditions throughout the country, but to carry on her “campaign” for women police. She is speaking before city clubs and organizations of every sort, and is visiting the mayor and chief of police in every city.

“I have spoken all the way across the continent and I shall speak all the way back. I realize that I am in a way doing propaganda work. When I applied for my appointment in Los Angeles I thought chiefly of the immediate work to be done right there by a woman. But when I was appointed, then came this—this terrifying publicity—and I realized what it meant.

“I realized that I should have to stand behind a sort of ‘movement’ for women in the police departments of other cities, just because I was the first in the field.”

Those citizens of Ohio who a dozen years ago used to throng the big circus-tent in which Tom L. Johnson was then[Pg 246] making his first campaigns in the country districts will recall the figure of the slender youth with the Grecian profile and the fair hair who used to stand there under the flaring light and speak of fundamental democracy. They, or those of them who were accessible to such impressions, caught something of the spirit of youthful idealism that was in the young man; if they did not, his presence and personality gave them reassurance, for attendance on one of Tom Johnson’s meetings in those days was, in Ohio, an enterprise to impart the thrill of a spicy and dangerous adventure. Time flies, and time has flown fast in this last decade, and the political ideas that Herbert S. Bigelow was helping Tom Johnson to disseminate, though they were flouted and scorned then as heretical, insane, and wicked, have since become, by the inevitable and monotonous operation of the universal law of progress, conventional, respectable, orthodox, and popular.

Herbert Bigelow was then not many years out of Lane Theological Seminary—strange spectacle in Ohio, that of a minister addressing Democratic meetings!—and he was pastor of the Vine Street Congregational Church, in Cincinnati. Vine Street Congregational Church was in itself an instance of the operation of the old law. Before the Civil War it was a hotbed of abolition when abolition was unpopular and unorthodox even in Ohio, though everybody in Ohio is an abolitionist to-day, and, if he is old enough, claims to have been so then. But after the war the Vine Street Church became respectable, with a cold and formal atmosphere of black walnut and musty cushions of a magenta shade, and when Herbert Bigelow began to preach a somewhat too literal application of the social ethics of Jesus, not to Hankow or Kordofan, but to Cincinnati, there was a disconcerting rustle in the pews, the tendency of that doctrine being to decrease the revenues of the church in an inverse ratio to the increase in the number of human beings in the congregation.

It is an interesting story, not to be told here in detail, of how Herbert Bigelow struggled, of how they tried to get him out of his pulpit, and of how he worked for a long time without salary, until Daniel Kiefer devised means of financing the institution, so that it lost its ecclesiastical atmosphere, became a People’s Church or forum for free speech, and moved into a theater where radicals preach their various and conflicting heresies on Sunday afternoons, after moving pictures have illustrated the progress of the species.

[Pg 247]

Meanwhile Herbert Bigelow was increasingly prominent in political reform movement; he lectured everywhere, wrote articles for radical publications, organized the Ohio Direct Legislation League, and poured all his energy into the propaganda of the initiative and referendum. The privileged interests opposed him, of course, and still oppose him. One way they did it was to call him Reverend; whenever it was necessary to frighten “good” people, by holding up his image, they printed the Reverend with the subtle and sinister implication of quotation-marks; whenever it was necessary to influence “bad” people, printing the Reverend without the quotation-marks.

But Herbert Bigelow was an idealist growing day by day more practical. He had had hard knocks in boyhood; he knew what it was to be poor; he had a love of his fellow man; he was saddened and appalled by the shadow of poverty everywhere, the shadow which so many are too blind to see, or too selfish and cowardly to admit. But this spirit of sympathy and of pity in him had been somehow ordered, organized, and made coherent by the philosophy of Henry George, and when that vision came to him, as does nearly every other who has a vision, he went to work for social justice.

His great opportunity came when, last year, a convention was called to draft a new constitution for Ohio, and he set out to impress the people with the fact that it was their opportunity. He organized the Ohio Progressive Constitution League, with subsidiary leagues in every county; he worked all summer; and through that league, aided and inspired by what the lecturers call the Spirit of the Times, a majority of delegates elected to the convention were pledged to the principles of direct legislation.

And for the first half of the year Mr. Bigelow was at Columbus, presiding over the constitutional convention as its president. At forty his figure is no longer slender; it has taken on the rotundity of the middle years; but as he sat there in gray tweeds, with the yellow hair hanging over his forehead, smiling, it must have been gratifying to him now and then to reflect that his old heresies had become so orthodox in his own time. The convention adopted articles providing for home rule for cities, for a license system to control the liquor traffic, for equal suffrage, for verdicts in civil cases by a three-fourths vote of the jury, for the welfare of labor, and, under Mr. Bigelow’s leadership, a clause adopting the initiative[Pg 248] and referendum in the State. When the vote was taken, and Herbert Bigelow had the satisfaction of announcing the triumph of the principle he had so long advocated, it was a moment that all his friends were glad to have him experience. The irony in which the fates usually award their laurels was not wanting in that instance, for in the clause there is a proviso that the initiative and referendum shall not be used by the people to adopt the single tax, supposed, in Ohio, to be a method of despoiling farmers by taxing land according to its superficial area. But Herbert Bigelow, whom fate taught long ago, like Josh Whitcomb, to accommodate himself to circumstances and to take what he can get, smiles and is happy; and his friends are happy with him.

Just because they thought an ostrich was a timid, harmless sort of creature, two men, one white and one black, were badly hurt at Mineola, Long Island, yesterday. Each of the men tried to catch and hold an ostrich at the Mineola Fair Grounds. The negro was kicked in the face, and landed about 20 feet from the bird; the white man was kicked in the chest and knocked down and had his clothes torn off him.

The ostrich that did all the damage is named Fleetwing. He and another ostrich, named Fleetfoot, arrived from Florida in two crates yesterday morning. They were brought to Mineola to race on the fair grounds this week at the fair of the Queens-Nassau County Agricultural Society. The birds have been trained to run races and pull light sulkies to which they are harnessed.

They are bad tempered, however, and are kept blindfolded frequently when they are not racing. A blindfolded ostrich is gentle as a lamb.

The blinding hood slipped off the eyes of Fleetwing at the fair grounds yesterday morning and in an instant the big bird was out of its crate, which was not covered. It started off on a run, and about two hundred persons ran after it. There was a merry chase around and around the racing track, and finally the ostrich was cornered.

A big negro looked at the ostrich and said:

“I reckon there ain’t no chicken ever were raised that I couldn’t hold, boss. I’ll hold his laig, an’ then you grab his haid.”

The negro wrapped his arms about one of Fleetwing’s legs and in a second was lifted into the air and landed about 20 feet away, with an ugly wound in the side of his face. Then Keeper Ford approached the ostrich from the front, and got an uppercut on his diaphragm, cutting his chest and tearing his clothes. Finally the ostrich was roped and recrated.

“That ain’t no chicken,” said the negro as he watched these proceedings from a safe distance. “That there’s a two-laiged mule.”

The Chinese wildcat in the Central Park Zoo has received a new lease of life, according to the keepers there, and a graphophone may be used now to make life seem more worth while to[Pg 250] him. If this plan is adopted one of the machines will collect sounds in Mott Street that are expected to help to cure the cat’s recurrent fits of nostalgia, which is the dictionary name for homesickness.

There is a box nailed to the wall by the side of the quarters of the lady hippopotamus and her young son, and on a shelf of this lies all day long a slim and long-bodied little animal with green eyes and a sweeping tail. The yellow sign says that it is a “Felis Chinensis.” He may take exercise at night, but all day he is motionless, still, apparently melancholy, noticing nothing.

He is in surroundings that offer little congeniality. The lady hippo and her young son are out of his class. The capybara not only is from South America, but is like a rat magnified some two hundred times. The lions across the aisle are from climes unknown to the Chinese wildcat. Practically everything in the Central Park Zoo has long ago learned how to eat peanuts, and has thus become more or less Americanized. The Felis Chinensis will not have peanuts.

Last week a couple of Chinamen, rare visitors at the Zoo, strayed into the lion house, stopping before the home of the wildcat. The minute he heard their talk he jumped from his shelf and began purring and rubbing himself against the side of his box. He played ball with a chicken bone on the floor, and had a good time. The uplift he got from this rode him along joyously for two days afterward.

And there is a plan on foot, say the keepers, to collect Mott Street sounds in a graphophone for the Felis Chinensis, if more laundrymen don’t visit the Zoo. There is some apprehension, however, as to how the lions and the tiger will take the graphophone.

A rabbit that residents of Sayville, L. I., declare plays on the piano has taken possession of a big house near Oakland, owned by Alexander H. Hunter. Mr. Hunter and his family are in Europe, and until they return bunny will lord it over parlor and pantry.

The rabbit didn’t go into the house because it wanted to. It was chased there by men with guns and dogs intent on taking its life, and the rabbit, unwilling to yield itself up for stew, bolted into the Hunter house via a drain pipe.

This was the way of it:

Herman Schmidt and a friend went out with dogs and guns yesterday for a hunt, and the hounds soon started the particular Br’er Rabbit who is making faces at the hunters from the front window of the Hunter place. When the dogs got close Br’er Rabbit didn’t hesitate. He laid his ears back and was away like a streak, with dogs and men in hot pursuit.

[Pg 251]

Toward the Hunter home ran the hunted and hunters, and it looked as if Schmidt would have a rabbit stew for supper. But the hunters had not calculated on a drain pipe which stuck out of the ground about 150 yards from the house, and great was their chagrin when cunning Br’er Rabbit whisked into it and disappeared.

Now that pipe leads right into the Hunter house, and pretty soon the hunters saw bunny at one of the windows. When they approached he retreated to the piano and kept running back and forth over the keys, making soft music.

There is no caretaker in the house, and the possibility of the damage that the rabbit will do, for which the hunters may have to pay, is appalling.

On the other hand, the rabbit may have to come out of the house to get something to eat. If he does he will get a warm reception at the end of the drain pipe. A couple of dogs are lurking about there. They tried hard to get into the pipe but they were too wide.

Dog Catcher Larson visited the Home for the Friendless with his little blue wagon Thursday afternoon, and he left behind him one hundred little tots with saddened hearts and cheeks that burned with scalding tears.

The bewhiskered dog catcher is no respecter of persons or of dogs. The high and low are the same to him, and he recognizes no distinction between the poodle and the fice. And so Thursday afternoon he gathered in the little pet of the children of the Home of the Friendless.

True, it was the pet of these little unfortunates. True, that they had raised this little dog, and that now it was only seven months old—not old enough to know about Atlanta’s dog law. Still, Jerry had no tag, and tagless Jerry therefore must take his place in the blue wagon and must await his turn to be ducked to death.

The children had no money and so could not pay the dollar for the tag. Now that the dog was arrested, still less did they have the $2.25 necessary to save him from a watery grave.

One and all they went to bed with heavy hearts, and as they knelt down beside their beds they did not forget to put in a word for “Poor Jerry!”

Friday morning the pangs of sorrow were too great, and their grief burst forth in wails. Jerry had been a companion to them, a faithful friend and a source of solace and comfort. He had never deserted them—and then Jerry was theirs, had been fed by them, raised by them, taught by them.

[Pg 252]

They knew it was not their fault he had not been tagged, and also they knew that Jerry was not to blame. And so they appealed to the superintendent. They begged, pleaded, cried. Nothing would suffice but the restoration of their fice.

The superintendent appealed to the mayor, the mayor to the probation officer, and now the probation officer is trying to touch the heart of the dog catcher.

All of the children are writing letters to city officials. “The cook got mad with Jerry,” writes little Ruth Wilson, “because he stole two of Mother Henry’s chickens, but Jerry didn’t mean any harm. Cook gave the dog to the dog catcher. We have got all the cats we want, but only one little dog—and that is Jerry. Please give him back to us, for we love him very much.”

Moving pictures inspired ten boys to “lynch” Harry Werner, their 9-year-old playmate, in Glencoe yesterday. So serious are his injuries that he may be crippled for life.

It was a “wild west” picture, absurd to the practical mind in its unrealities, that gave the boys their idea.

They saw in the flickering pictures a score of “cowboys,” their revolvers strapped on the wrong side, while they mounted their horses also from the wrong side, and rode with the grace and skill of wooden Indians.

The boys did not notice these details. They saw only the rakishness and swaggering daredeviltry. They applauded vociferously the “stringing-up” of the actor-cowboy.

“Let’s play wild west,” one 10-year-old enthusiast proposed after the show. The vote was unanimous.

Wooden revolvers were fashioned. Fathers’ discarded hats took the place of sombréros. Broom sticks served as prancing bronchos.

“Who’ll we lynch?” one asked. Harry Werner was selected. His dark hair and eyes led to his unwilling selection by them for the rôle of “villain.”

They tied a clothes-line under his arms and threw the rope over a branch of a tree. Whooping madly, in true moving-picture-wild-west fashion, they pulled him up until his feet were far from the ground.

The thin rope cut into his tender flesh. He struggled and implored his comrades to let him down. His pleas brought renewed whoops. Had not the “villain” in the moving-picture struggled and cried for mercy?

For half an hour they kept him there. Then they cut the rope and let his body fall to the ground. Their childish eyes did not see that he was unconscious. They seized the rope and dragged[Pg 253] him for several minutes, leaving him on the ground to find his way home alone.

Physicians who examined him declared that he may be disabled permanently.

Tommy is a hero to-day. All his playmates that live on Greene street, near Wolcott avenue, are envious, and speak to him in awed whispers, for did he not go to hunt a Saracen and return covered with bean-juice and glory? All their mothers, too, are keeping a sharp watch on the family crockery.

This is how it happened:

Papa Devine had told Tommy about a lot of men who called themselves Crusaders, who went to lick a lot of other chaps known as Saracens. And when papa told him how the Crusaders wore armor plates on their chests and backs and arms and legs and big helmets on their heads, Tommy decided that he would take a crack at the Saracens himself.

When Papa Devine went out, and Mamma Devine was busy upstairs, Tommy thought it would be a good time to start on his crusade.

Going into the kitchen, he tied a frying pan about his neck so that it hung down over his stomach, strung the lid of the clothes boiler over his back, and then sought a helmet that would resist the swords and battle-axes of the enemy.

As he pondered he sniffed the air. Then a bright idea came. Cautiously he opened the stove door. Mamma Devine was cooking beans à la Boston and Tommy Devine drew forth a big round stone pot full of the delicious fruit. Carefully he emptied the contents into the sink and thrust the pot on his head.

The bean juice ran down into his eyes and ears, but that didn’t matter—he was going to hunt Saracens. Then the pot felt uncomfortable, and Tommy decided to take it off and refit it to his head.

Horrors! The pot would not budge. It was stuck on his head. Pull as he might he could not get it off. He sat down in the corner to plan a campaign of action, and consoled himself with licking the dripping bean treacle from his nose end. That got tiresome after a while, so Tommy sought his mother.

Mrs. Devine scolded over the lost beans at first, and then tried to remove the pot, but she, too, was unsuccessful. Then she became alarmed. In desperation she started for the doctor’s with the pot still on Tommy’s head, the pans jangling around his neck, and the bean juice running down his back.

Passengers in the street car dropped their papers in amazement, for they did not know that Tommy was a crusader, while Mrs.[Pg 254] Devine looked out of the window and tried to make it appear that crusading was an every day affair.

But Tommy’s tears and wails attracted the attention of an old man. He stopped the car and called the motorman, who came with his controller handle in his hand.

“Crack the blamed thing off,” ordered the old man.

The motorman cracked, and off fell the jar. Tommy set up a whoop of joy, and Mrs. Devine hurried home to give the erstwhile crusader a bath—and a spanking.