The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-04-21
BOUNCED FROM THE PIT
TERRIBLE ADVENTUBE OF 4
 DRINK ER
Who Thought Himself i'm satin's Do-
 main,

A man in this city had an adventure
 last night that he will not soon forget,
 To-day he probably is looking for 9
 clergyman before whom he may take
 the pledge.
 | This man, whose name is not known, went to the Tivoli last night, presum- 1 ably alone. Circumstantial evidence
 justifies the opinion that he had been drinking q good deal before the show
 and that the comfortable warmth of the theater set the alcohol at his
 nerves and made him drunk, He went to sleep in his seat and slept peacefully through the shoW-slept through all the acts, slept when the curtain fell
 on the last tableau, slept while the au-
 dience moved out, slept when the lights were doused, slept, perhaps until
 midnight.
 Then he awoke-to what? About him
 was the cavernous darkness Where
 was he? Was he dead and in the
 tomb? Was he in some black hole of
 the internal regions? He could not rec
 ollect where he had last sen himself.
 His brain was muddled He felt
 strange, unnerving terror. He shouted,
 but his voice echoed vainly through
 the vague emptiness. An, light, It was the single incandescent light left
 burning all night in the theater as re- quired by the insurance policy, but the man in the Tivoli did not know that.
 He thought it was the distant exit from the cave. He groped toward the light. Strange obstacles impeded him, but still he made headWay until he came to bank or wall, which was the stage. Up this wall he climbed, but he had hardly mounted it when he en- countered some great Tapping wing (the curtain) that felt as though it were the wing of some gigantic bat. He felt his way along this trembling wing until he came to the end He seized the wing and tugged at it with all his might Had he lacerated the bat? Would that creature attack him? He fled in fear to the other end of the eave-for he reasoned by this time that heW as a prisoner in some great cav ern in the bowels of the earth.
 At the other end he ran against a wall He resolved to cut his way out By this time he had stumbled into the womens parlor Drawing a jackknife he began to carve his way to liberty. The partition between the women's | paror and the stairway leading to the bar is thin and frail. Tn a short while | the prisoner had cut hole large enough to bring his body through. On | the stairway, however, the hole was about five feet from the bottom. He plunged through the hole into the dark abyss and fell down five feet, No doubt, in his excited imagination it seemed that he had fallen at least the diameter of the earth Had he but | known that he was within few feet | of bar we'll stocked with liquors-but why talk of what might have been? According to his rapid calculation, while falling he was at about the cen- ter of the earth on his way to the in- fernal regions When he sruck the k stairs he must have imagined that he was running q gauntlet of 10000 devils.
 Naturally, he shrieked and shrieked. His shrieks were re-echoed in the ampty house and came back to him like the clamors of the pit-not the theater pit, but the pit of the inferno.
 Just then the Japanese who sweeps the theater arrived. He was a little ate and had been taking midnight luncheon in a neighboring cafe. Hear Ing the bedlam within the theater he was afraid, But he got a lantern and proceeded to find out the cause of the noise. Led by the shouts. he soon dis al Q the bar At the same moment the ost soul perceived the latnern and the Japanese.
 Back, demon, back" he shouted, staggering to his feet and thinking hat the Japanese was one of the at