Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1883 — IN MALE ATTIRE. [ARTICLE]

IN MALE ATTIRE.

A Chicago Girt Who Successfully Personated the Jolly Tar. A young woman with a history was locked up at a Chicago police station the other night She was dressed in men’s clothing, and her disguise was the most deceiving the police ever met with. She was arrested on the docks, where she mingled as a sailor without her sex being discovered by even her nearest associate. For three years she has acted as cook’s mate aboard various lake vessels, always passing for a boy and mingling with the sailors as one of them. She could give no other name than Frank Chambers, insisting that her real name was too sacred to divulge in apolice station. She said she was born in Newanc, Ohio, seventeen years ago, and donned male attire the better to get along. There was not one chance in twenty of getting employment as a woman where she could succeed as a man, and, as the latter had the better of it through life, she concluded to disguise her identity and engage in labor performed by the other sex She liked the change. She liked the sea, and took to it to the manner born. Though mixing constantly with the very roughest of the sea-faring element, few ever discovered her secret She drank with the rough sailots, hut was wise enough not to take too much, and she never became intoxicated. She accompanied them in their roistering tours when in port but always had a ready excuse to offer when any frolic was proposed that might disclose her sex She believed in woman’s rights and smoked and chewed with the ease of an old tar. All her movements were mupculine and her conversation was plentifully interlayed with expressions characteristic of the sterner sex When proffered a cigar, she lit the match on her trousers, and when it went out, her disgust was expressed in terms more emphatic than elegant She seemed to be a laa of eighteen, and though her features were regular and pleasing, there was nothing effeminate in her look. Her hair was cut close to the scalp, as if by a machine, and she wore a frock coat and black trousers, a cheviot shirt and a nobby derby. “Some one gave me away,” was the reply she made when asked how she came to be arrested. “I have only been in the town a few days, and behaved myself the best I could. No one would suspect who I am, and I was never found out until I got in a row with a fellow once. I got a black eye, but then there is always a black eye aboard a ship; if the Captain hasn’t got it, some of the crew have.”