davidaulloa/AmericanStories huggingface dataset:
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13
Copyright, 1895, by Irving Bacheller.)
CHAPTER III.

NopyriSnt, 1900, py irving bacheiler)
CHAPTER III.
(Concluded)
This was all very well, and I listened
with the greatest interest but I was none
the clearer as to what young Duroc wished
me to do.
How can be Of service to you?" ask
ed
by coming up with me.H
ITO the castlef''
Precisely"
''When?"
"At once"
But what do you intend to dor'
Il shall know what to do But wish
you to be with me all the same"
Well, 1t never was In my nature to re-
fuse an adventure, and, besides, I had
every sympathy with the lads feelings. 1t
Is very easy to forgive ones enemies, but
one wishes to give them something to for
give also. I held out my hand to him,
therefore.
Il must be on my way to Rossel tomor-
row morning, but tonight am yours" said
I.
We left our troopers in snug quarters
and, as it was but mile to the castle, we
did not disturb the horses. TO tell the
truth, / hate to see cavalryman walk.
and 1 hold that just as he is the most gal
liant thing upon earth when he has his
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13

backward down the
TRAIL" said the old
cattleman, 'ff there
is one man I reflects
on with satisfaction
its Cherokee Hall.
This yere Hall was
the modestest, decent
est longhorn as ever
shakes his antlers in
Arizona. He was
slim and light, with
a thin face and gray
eyes This vera man
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13

blackened limbs would be shot higher than
the castle keep. Who could believe that
a half-inch of candle could take so long to
burn? My ears were straining all the time
for the thudding Of the hoofs OF the cos
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13

had been filled with candles. 1t was about
the size of my busby-large enough to hold
several pounds of powder. Duroc filled it
while cut off the end of a candle. When
we had finished 1t would have puzzled a
colonel of engineers to make a better Pc
tard. I put three cheeses ON top of each
other and placed it above them so as to
lean against the lock. Then we lit our
candle-end and ran for shelter, shutting
the door of the magazine behind us.
1t was no joke, my friends, to lie among
all those tons of powder, with the knowl-
edge that If the flame of the explosion
should penetrate through one thin door our
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13
From Life.

The Banana Peel, the Acrobat and
the disappointed Boy.
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-07-13
When Times Were Flush on the
Frontier.
rHE Old CATTLEMAN'S STORY
A Wild Stage Ride Through a
Canyon.
SINGLE HANDED INDIAN FIGHT
Written for The Evening Star.

NN/HHN LooK 8
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

pair, assuming (which Is not of abso- lute necessity a truth that the imbecile offspring of the original sons were childless. Thus from the two criminals with whom the search began sprang sixty persons within three generations. No human being can guess how long the miserable curse will pursue this wretched family, or how many will be damned by it. Were it not for the providential dispensation that crimi- nality and profigacy are seldom linked, every person on this earth would long ago rhave been sin-tainted. But this array proves the wisdom of the London plan. By destroying her slums she is destroying their criminal influence and their temptations, and the splendid re- suit of this destruction is written in letters of gold on her police records in the amazing decrease of crime there. This is modern progress that is pro gressive
 Of course, I do not mean to say that Whitechapel has been metamorphosed into district where men and women are invariably pure and holy, or even that it now approaches the average standard of morality and decency. So far as l know, no curb has been placed upon vice-as distinguished from crime there or elsewhere in London, and filth and drunkenness and petty dis honesty are woeful1y prevalent. But I do mean to say that crime can no long CT walk Whitechapel streets un- watched and work its will; it would have been safer to commit murder on the Strands brightest block ten years ago than it would be to commit murder on any street have seen in White chapel now. In hundreds of spots throughout the district the rough, high board fences which always in London surround a place where the destruc- ton of old buildings or the construc= ton of new ones is going on meet the eye; and each one of those fences means that some old slum is being done away with, to be replaced by well-con- strueted buildings, and wide, we'll lighted streets. The narrow, blind alleys, and mysterious, threatening courts, of which old London was full, and of which hundreds still remain, can no longer be built Splendid sani- tary plans are required for every new building that goes up.
 A few nights ago inveigled Lon doner, still young, but staid and sober, into taking me about through the part
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

yet both were selected entirely at ran dom. Were it possible for me at the moment to get figures for two twelve months for comparison, should feel more certain that I was not exaggerat- ing, but, unfortunately, have tempo rarily exhausted the patience of my in- formant in obtaining the figures which l give. Still, assuming that some al- lowance must be made on this score, surely it cannot be that a difference of more than one hundred per centum can possibly be attributable to chance. Sup pose we cut it half and make it fifty per centum. What a vast advance is thatl The improvements which Lon don has, as a city, made in her slum districts, have cost some millions of pounds. But suppose that for every one thousand pounds she stops a man from crime and turns his work into honest channels. Observe her profit:
 First, she saves what she would have lost through his evil doing. Second, she saves what it would have cost to watch him, apprehend him and con- vict him. Third, she saves what it would have cost her to guard him, feed him and clothe him during the period of his punishment Fourth, she saves what his criminal influence on his companions would have cost her. Fifth, and this is by far a greater economy than all the others put to- gerher, she saves the cost of paying for the shadow which his criminal ten dencies would have cast on his posteri- ty for all time to come. Before you figure this last item up, let me tell you the results of one investigation which was made by some philanthropic or ganization in New York city. 1 be- ieve it to have been the Prison Reform association, and it is the only complete study of it's kind that have ever heard of.
 They traced the posterity of youth of criminal antecedents and a girl born, think, in the Hudson county (N. Y.) poorhouse, and found that they had two sons and three daughters. The three daughters all went wrong and only one died childless. The other two brought nine children into the world, all criminals. Both sons be- came professional criminals, and they had five children, two of whom were imbeciles, and thus became charges on the community at large. The re- search into the third generation was less definite, but the origin of no less than forty-one inn beetles, paupers and professional criminals was traced to the twelve grandchildren of the original criminal
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

by business blocks or by plain, sub- stantial dwellings for the poor, with big windows, airy rooms, all sanitary improvements and conveniences-build- ings calculated to implant and develop self-respect and fellow-respect in the persons who live therein, certain to encourage healthfulness of body and healthfulness of mind. The new streets are well paved and well cleaned, are well lighted and well policed. As they extend the criminal fees before them to eoncen- trate in the few dark and dingy dis tricts still remaining, but after he has taken refuge there he finds that the strong arm of the law has gone before him and is ready to receive him. A blue-coat is on every corner. Not in the darkest depths of what is left of old Whitechapel is there a single blind alley which does not echo with the heavy chatter of constable's footsteps every thirty minutes, day and night. Nothing could be more discouraging to the enterprising and industrious erini- nal; nothing could be better calculated to encourage him to change into an en- terprising and industrious, honest man.
 Almost all of this has been done within the last fifteen years. Now to prove that 1 am not theorist, striving to carry his point at any cost by twist ing things and. perhaps, by hiding one side not favorable to him (and honest theorists have been known to do such things unconsciously), let me show what the condition was here during a week of 1880, chosen at random, and tabulated, as nearly as possible, in the same way that l have tabulated last weeks crimes. Perhaps it may be as well to print the tables side by side. Here they are:
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

at the time the Ripper murders filled American newspapers and weeklies with graphic accounts of that extraor- dinary district.
 Neither applies now. Doubtless Dick ens' pen pictures of Fagin and Bill Sy les and their homes and their com panions were faithful then, and it is probable that the American journalists who were sent here to study White chapel and its people were as accurate in their descriptions as the excitement of the time and the brevity of their hurried visits permitted them to be. But Dickens time is past, and even since the Ripper" days London has metamorphosed.
 To obtain an American population equal to that of London one must draw a circle fifteen miles in circumference around New York and count all the people which it includes This em- braces New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Hobolen. Long Island City, and almost a score of small towns. A weeks file of New York paper is on my table, and have had all the high way robhories. burglaries, bank rob-
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

This is true, and adds another great power to that of slum annihilation. The school board laws are enforced here with rigor which is almost Rus- sian. They even work great hardship occasionally, as was instanced in the experience of the poor devil who was recently driven, through lack of em- ployment and distress, to kill his whole family of six and commit suicide. Dur ing the winter just past he had been unable to provide his children with clothes good enough to permit them to appear at school. Thrice he was taken before magistrate because they had not attended regularly. The first time he was warned and discharged. The second time he was fined five shillings, which he managed to pay with diff culty: the third time he was fined ten shillings which he could not pay at all, so he was imprisoned for one month, thus forcing him to suffer keen dis grace, and, besides, depriving his fam ilv for that period of the few shillings which he might otherwise have earned. This misfortune was, unquestiOnably, one of the things which drove him to commit the terrible crime with which he absolutely wiped out his family and himself.
 Still, in the main, the school board laws work good. London's streets are never cluttered with romping, cursing youngsters, as are those of most Amer ican cities. Boys are not permitted to sell newspapers during school hours, and bootblacls must be licensed, and must wear red jackets and big brass badges before they can ply their trade I have not seen one little girl selling papers since l have been in London, al- though flower girls-over twelve-are not infrequent The child vagrant- the tot lying asleep in doorways and on the elevated railroad stairways of New York-is unknown here.
 Still, despite these vast advances London is by no means without her crime. The condition of blank despair which such abject poverty as is com mon here brings about. extends the suicide list to distressing length; if one wishes to class prostitution as a crime then lie must admit that London leads the world in it, because, as I have said, there is absolutely no legal restraint upon 1t here; certain kind of business swindling is more common here than elsewhere, and horrible domestic tragedies, such as l have already re- ferred to-the septuple homicide at Fopping-are distressingly common. London's pickpoelets are most numer- ous and expert, and plain thefts of all lzinds-omitting those which require violence to person or building in their execution-outnumbe similar crimes in the American metropolitan district by thirteen to one.
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

that such has beSn my personal Idea. Whenever 1 have thought of London crime it has risen before me in a melo- drama setting of narrow streets and dull old houses, of dark cellars and gloomy arches under bridges and along the Thames embankment. l have thought of London as city so vast that parts of it must be given over to the haunts of sordid vice and low browed scoundrelism. 1 have thought that even as aristocracy has it's Bel gravia here, so must Whitechapel be the abode of exclusive and selected wicl1edness. have pictured slouehing heavy-yisaged villains darting desper- ately out of darlkling doorways to smite and rob the wayfarer; weII-praeticed burglars roaming London streets at night housebrealzing, in scorn of the police, and gathering before dawn in some east side den to share their spells and arrange new raids; shrewd Fagins in their schools of crime, teach ing tiny tots the art of picking pockets; depraved women, whose only trade is to coarsely lure men into gloomy base ments, there to drug and rob them. l have read of the vast number of unem- ployed in London. of the starving hordes, and l have theorized that where hunger is there also must be vio- Ience, and that, therefore, highway rob- bery and window robbery, sneak thieves and kindred offenders must be plentiful in the queens metropolis. I have imagined that dark seeds of vio- lence must be common in a city which could develop Jack the Ripper, and I have thought of bloody murders and mutilated corpses thrown into the waters of the Thames.
 l have been all wrong.
 do not now believe that anywhere else under the sun there are 4,00O, ,000 people-be they gathered into one city or scattered in many-where so few crimes of the kinds which have in- staneed are committed.
 When the average American thinks of London crime, he thinks of the crimes of Dickens London, or else re- members what he read of Whitechapel
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

duced the electric light into them all, and, presto! came a change Crime had dropped fifteen per cent. by the time the system was completed. Even the men who urged the improvement were amazed. The blind can read the reason for it. After the searching rays of the electric ares revealed every nook and cranny, and made every hitherto dark and narrow alley light and~apen to the inquiring glance of police and citizens, the criminal no longer dared to operate there. Thus, forced out of living by sinful methods, he must either gain an honest livelihood by honest work or leave the city. A few may have gone away, but the vast ma jority remained and mended their ways. They were reformed by an electric lighting system!
 And so London is being rapidly re- generated. Old London, as Dickens knew it, even as Jack the Ripper'' knew it, is disappearing, and, in its place is springing up city of wide streets, well lighted. These are not lined by rambling rool1eries, crime and disease breeding, but arc faced either
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

of the -Holborn-whieh he knew best during his school days, and after he had left college, during his bachelor period, when, as gay young buck. he found many a strange resort and par ticipated in many street adventure.
 We left the stage of Drury Lane on the last pantomime night to do it. and that neighborhood had been changed but little. He stepped off confidently, full of anticipations of the pleasure he would derive from a visit to localities which he had not visited for ten years. Then we passed through a new street. He commented on it. Presently we found that the whole neighborhood was new. He began to peer puzzledlv at the street names on the corners of the houses, and finally stopped
 Well, so far as l can see, 5 said he. "this is where that alluring little court of which 1 told you opened off the main street to lead to that delicious lit tie public house. But now it's an of flee building"
 And so it went for an hour. Occa- slonaIly he ran across a building which he knew, and hailed it gleefully as an old friend in the midst of strangers. lie had told me of many little streets in Holborn, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century houses, built of tim Der and plaster, each story rising broader and broader, until the peaked roofs almost met until two people could shake hands from the upner stories across the street. Not one of those streets is left. We found ono row of the old houses, but the other side Of the street had been torn away and the thoroughfare widened from twelve to forty feet. There were almost tears in his eyes as we gave m the search for the London he used to know IL was the London that was picturesque and interesting, the London that exuded literature, that created Dickens. +be London that fascinated and deliohtad tourists; but it was the London that was tire-swept and plague-ravished. the London that was murder-stained and crlme-cursed, and it exists no longer.
 one of the high officials in Scotland Yard, after commenting on these thinps added: D
 But a scarcely less vital enemy to crime has been our school board laws Little boys and girls are no longer per !nltted to roam the streets at will. even Tn the poorest districts. They must take the advantages of education whether they want to or not, and the parents must give them these advan- eages whether they are disposed to or
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19

thirteen, still her total in the seven branches of sin considered is only forty-three, against New York's fifty, for even days.
 And this is in spite of the fact that London's population is almost as cos mopolitan as is New Yorlt's, that she is the sink hole into which the moral dregs of all Great Britain drain, that the personnel of her police force is in comparably inferior to New. Yorl1s Of course, there is reason for 1t, and 1 learned that reason within three days of the moment 1 touched London.
 London is abolishing her criminals by abolishing the conditions which ere ate them.
 Man is a creature of environment to greater degree than most persons or most municipalities understand. So- ciologists have proved time and again that the undeveloped human animal will remain undeveloped just so long as he is in the midst of undeveloped sur roundings. Place him among edu- cated things, even though they be but educated = refined and perfected DE4ChS Siilei IlOIGdTy duQ uG WILL 1G6I their influence with rapidity that is not less than amazing to the student. The experiment has been tried in the slum districts of New York city. The construction of Mir. R. Fulton Cuttings model t,nements on East Fourteenth street reduced the crime record of the nelghborhood by a considerable per centage, although they did not reduce, but rather increased, its population, and did not change it's personnel at all The old buildings which the new dwellings thus replaced had been of character to encourage filth and morbid liv- ing, and so develop crime. The new buildings were of nature to en- courage cleanliness and normal home life, and so developed morality. Phila- delphia was overrun by thugs and highway robbers and the general genus tough. Her dark alleys, narrow and gloomy, afforded countless opportuni- ties for assaults and hiding hooks for criminals. By und by the city intro
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19
ICOPYRIGHT. I8AS. l


 London has long been known not only as the biggest city in the world, but also as the city in which the worlds more morbid crimes are committed. Paris is reputed to be the place in which vice as distinguished from crime is more prevalent than elsewhere; but it is generally guessed her wiclzedness is gay and frivolous. New York and Chicago, of course-all things American are daring, bless 'eml-have borne the name of being the towns in which the boldest and most stupendousc crimes are planned and executed. Thus, in the public mind, the four greatest cities in the world have been classified. I know
Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-05-19
EDW ARD MARSHALL.
AMUSING VISITORS.
Whittler's Old Home the shrine of Many
 Worshipers.

Worshipers.
 At the homestead of John G. Whit tier, now the property of the city of Haverhill through a generous bequest, and open to the public, all kinds of visitors are received, and the emotions or the lack of them, which they display as they view the ample kitchen im- mortalized in sSnowbound, are many and various.
 As one party of visitors moved, with low exelamations of delight, from point to point of the low-ceiled, irregular room, pausing before the wide hearth to look at the big bull 's-eye watch hang ing above it, or stood gazing into the door of the tiny kitchen bedroom, now a pantry, and scarcely larger. than a closet, where the poets parents always slept, they were accompanied by ven- erable, white-haired woman who was stranger to them.
 She was sharp-faced, and clad in old fashioned clothes, typical New Eng lander, and was apparently deeply oc. cupied with the objects before her. They felt much interest in her person. ality and feelings, and thought it likely that to woman of her age and tradi- tions "Snowbound" might well be the poem of poems, and this pilgrimage one of especial reverence and delight.
 With subdued curiosity they waited to hear her express herself She did not speak word until they all stood before the door up to which the poets lovely Aunt Mercy had once seen the wrath of her lover ride on horseback at the hour and minute of the night when he was killed many hundred miles away.
 As they looked out on the quiet, sum- ny landscape beyond the threshold, one of the company, an old friend of Mir. Whittier's, related the eerie tale The thrill of it's ghostliness passed from listener to listener, and moved even the venerable stranger to utterance. She spoke for the only time during the visit, saying, with gaspof utter incredulity;
 "Oh, git aout!''
 Another woman present, a resident of the neighborhood, abruptly asked the lady who had known the poet what college he had attended, and as she besitated moment to reply, added the further explanation:
 Il mean, whered he git his schoolin'? He must have been learned man to write books, and folks are always ask in me where he got it, and I'd kinder like to be able to tell lem. Where'd he git all his learnin', anyway"
 She was told how simple and limited the schooling of the great poet of New England had been, but it seemed diff1- cult for her, as indeed it is to many people ignorant of literary culture, to realize how widely separate are scholar ship and genius.
 Scholarship, indeed, may be either help or hindrance to the higher faculty. 1t widens the resources of art, but also It may lessen that intense sympathy with familiar things in their beauty, significance and simplicity, which Whit tier so fully possessed. His scholar ship, though not to be despised, was subordinate matter. A scholar-poet, or poet who wrote for scholars, could never have made that plain, old farm house kitchen the shrine it has become alike to learned and unlearned.- Youths Companion.
 In the Spring.
 He-Everything seems to be on the move