The Newtown bee., 1879-07-16
A Victim of Morphine.

A young girl jumped from bridge fn Chicago into the river, with the inten- ton of committing suicide, but was res- cued and taken to 8 station house. A few moments after her incarceration the girl was seen by reporter in her cell. She was a revelation in the way of peculiar and startling beauty. Her tangled masses of blue black hair, yet damp from the recent search after nothingness, were bound back from low, Clytie-like fore head in one deft coil which wound about the dainty brow as though it were a crown. Beneath flashed and glowed a pair of great luminous eyes which sent out from their puzzling midnight depths wondrous gleams of inquiry, doubt and questioning, over all of which there seemed to dominate the hopefulness of unutterable despair. The petite figure was arrayed wholly in black, relieved only at the throat by some little article of feminine adornment.
 "What is your name?' queried Cap tain O'Donnen.
 Mary Hays
 "Why did you try to kill yourself?"
 
 ing you? Nobody in this big world cares for me, and if choose to end my misery, why, in Gods name, should 1 be prevented?"
 Haven't you any friends?" Friends? No; not one. If had do you suppose I'd have been doing kitchen work drudgery to keep soul and body together?"
 But you seem an unusually lady like, intelligent girl. What is the mat ter?"
 "Matter! If you felt yourself grap- pied with hooks of steel, and knew your destiny was dragging you straight down to the lowest pit, could you stand it to face hour by hour that awful torment of a remorseless habit and fight as I have | fought Matter? The matter is cant stop using morphine. Look at me now Behind the bars of common jail, be- draggled, unkempt, an outcast. My God My God! why didn't you let me die?' and finging herself on the hard wooden bench the poor thing sobbed as if hel heart would break.
 
 the reporter asked.
 Ever since l was a child of twelve My mother ate it, and I, a poor, silly schoolgirl, would steal from her boz little quantities of the drug. It seemed a grand thing then, and l would cOnjur up the most gorgeous visions one eve saw or heard of For while the habi .l..it LI bound me about with the most awful chains. You men," she continued, ma, despise and sheer at me now, but it's no so very long since you'd have been glat to know me and lift your hats when passed along the streets. I was born il New Orleans, and my father was fo eight years State treasurer of Arkansas l learned bookkeeping with him, am got good place in the Treasury Depart ment at Washington. Then l came Chicago, and James Stewart gave m $10O per month to keep his books. los that situation through morphine, bu , procured another one right off just 8 good with W. D. Kerfoot. MOrphin again, and the only resource left me WE to live out as common servant at tw Z dollars a week. Once more-that is onl 7 a few days ago-I failed in even tn 2 miserable resource, and houseless, homt less, a wanderer, what would you hay me do but die?n
 "Wasn't the water cold?" , "Cold (shuddering)? Oh, God ye: but it was warm and kindly and char table beside the people who fear it. shall go down to the river the moment get out of here. There is no spot in a o this world for such wretch as l." There was touch of inexpressib a pathos in the last words, and the inte 5 locutors moved silently away and le the poor girl with her sorrow and Y spair.