Omaha daily bee., 1888-05-27

there, who respect the law as they do each
other, and value human life only at the worth
of the contents of a victims pockets. Just
the men are they, found in every large city,
to follow n leader and join in the mob. "We
don't have any trouble to speak of now with
the alley" said the policeman, "for we've
got it pretty we'll under control, but there
was a time when there was hell and robbery
in the alley every night, and then we had
our hands full"
How did you manage to obtain the system
of order prevailing!" / asked.
"Clubbed EN-" replied the policeman
laconically. ''Them fellows is afraid of a
clubbin', and yer got to treat 'em like yer
would a wild beast" And the policeman in
other words simply announced Napoleon's
axiom: xiii the mob first; read the riot
act after"
The women of Dago alley are the cast
aways of a life for which disease has untitled
them. | grew interested in the story of one
of them, as she told me of her former life,
over the drippings of stale beer sent her
from a neighboring dive. She was not old,
save in sin, and in her features, as much as
was left in their regularity from many a
beating, one might trace the lines of former
beauty. She had been in her day of the
~''scarlet sisterhood,'' and worn diamonds,
and she contrasted her present day of cast
off beer drinking and poverty with that
other day of champagne cork-popping
and jewels and caresses. Step by step
her downward career was swift and sudden
and with scarcely breathing time, TO realize
the transition and the rounding of her life
is the inevitable story in the end of the exist
ence of the ''siren VINO lures mems souls to
hell" Poverty and diseases, with a brutal
Bill Sykes for Il protector and n shamble in
Dago alley, then Potter's field and the dis
secting table, the last records of the woman
of the town who survives her youth and
beauty.
Children sometimes play in the alley with
ash heaps as a play ground, little weakened
things whose very life will prove their future
disgrace IN the SINS Of their parents and one
looking at their diseased-racked frames and
blear, expressionless eyes could wish in hui
man kindness that an early death might end
their lives of misery.
-.
A romance came upon the alley q few
months ago in the shape of a suicide. There
is one house along its wastes more gaudily
furnished than the rest, in that snowy red
curtains hang at its windows like the splen-
doris of the cabin of n canal boat. And seek
ing the shelter Of this den, came a young girl
whose life for years had known no purer at
mosphere than the air of a dive, no kinder
words than the curses OF a lover. She came
with her sins fresh upon her in the very last
stage of restitution, for she had been cast off
and spurned by her protector. She could
bear his reproaches and his blows but not his
neglect, for in it the woman's pride, lost
though she was, asserted itself in the re-
membrance of her sacrifices and what she
called her love. With no eye TO watch her,
no word left To tell of her contri-
ton she drank laudanum in a room
in the red-curtained house in the alley at the
dead of night and in the morning was found
with her wide-open eyes staring wildly at the
IMPLYING sunlight and the gaping crowds
staring wildly AT her. Decent people,
relatives of the girl, came down to the alley
and gave her christian burial, for in the
purity of death they could touch her. And
so pass the days and nights, the sin and
misery, the wretchedness and poverty, the
merry. g~o-round of disease and despair and
death in Dago alley. But civilization is com
ing TO obliterate all vestiges of the place in
the brick and mortar of the great buildings
in contemplation upon its site and soon the
alley will be but a memory recalled by the
| bictorian