The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-10-29

throwing strikers off a front platform and yet can't spur Up boarding house
 keepers memory as to events that hap
 pened fifteen years ago.
 Another may have too weak lungs to stand a rainy nights watching in a Tenderloin areaway and yet can put on a dress suit and say, Madam, under stand that you have not been invited to
 this ceremony and must hence escort you without disturbance to the door, with such a genteel front that the rest of the wedding guests think he's for eign count looking only for the great American rock.
 Every firm, too, has it's pet line. One handles strikes, another commercial
 cases. There's one house that does al-
 most entirely society function busi- ness, dresses its people up in glad rags and liyeries and has women to assist the dressing room maid and see that no lady goes off with sealskin cloak and
 leaves a raglan.
 "They guard the front stairs to see if the butler knows all the guests and the back stairs to see that no bogus walters or musicians ring themselves in. If any one seems not to have any friends | in the room, first the servants and then the hostess are asked to identify him
 or her. If they can't, the hollow-chest- l ed, soft-voieed man gets in his quiet work and there's never any scene or
 scandal" A class of detective work which few big firms care to handle is that con nected with divorce suits. While the
 manager quoted at the beginning of
 this article was speaking a knock came at the door, followed by the entrance of an assistant. Across the threshold
 waited black-haired, red-cheeked wo-
 man.
 AS the manager saw her he shook his head.
 You'll never guess what she had the nerve to ask us to do,'' he explained,
 when the whispered consultation was over and the door was closed again. ''She wanted us to get an out-of-town mans home address for her. [s
 Seems innocent? f Maybe. But no accessory to blackmail for mine! Even straight divorce evidence getting we never touch. rs ..s.. s..-.-S
 No private detectives testimony goes for anything before a judge. The only thing an agency can do is to find wit nesses, and in nine cases out of ten these have already been bought up by the other side" *..,..e~ sSs T
 The same manager was asked what kept men Tn a business the glamour of which must obviously wear off in a few years. l....9
 It's the good pay, steady work and fairly easy life" he said. "A good de- tective earns se a day and expenses. Then a man can keep at 1t up to the time he's sixty. Besides, they often graduate from us into being the confi- dential man of a corporation, the guard of bank or the special man of hotel. As for the life, the strikes are the only trying feature. But we're not called in to break every strike, and while few if the present generation like to fight all the time, there are still some who aren't averse to little fighting part of the time.' X
 Two popular notions which the man. ager was emphatic in declaring mistak- en were that private detectives wear disguises, and that they receive hand some presents as reward for their services.
 No detective is sufficiently conspicu- ous in city to need a disguise" he ex- plained. And in country cases we find it quite convenient to change our men as much to get several diff ferent views on the same matter as for any other reason. Az s.l s**.5..-t5
 .'As a matter of fact although we ur1- fortunately didn't do it in poor Ver- dues case, we generally hire a, room near where the suspected person lives, and thus our watchers are rarely dis turbed by the What are you hanging round for?' of off1cious bullies. F
 stAs for the gold cigarette cases and silver mounted pistols which Sherlock Holmes used to receive, we try as much as possible to keep our clients and our operators from knowing each other. This keeps the client from pestering the operator with private instructions, and the operator, if he should ever chance to go wrong and leave us, from going to the client and saying: T know such and such thing: how anxious are you to have me forget it?' "-New York Sun. '-- ss