Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 March 1889 — BILL NYE IN ST. LOUIS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

BILL NYE IN ST. LOUIS.

It In Do'ng m Man n Service There to Lock Him Up—An Exciting Fpitiode Involving; the Fate of a Fa r of Trousers.

LOUIS is only city I have ever vis ited where it seemed like paying a man a delicate tribute to arrest him. When you are arrested in St. Louis you do not go reluctantly to the nearest station by

means of the scruff of jour neck, through a hooting and madding crowd, lint the policeman who has arrested you sends in a signal from the nearest box, and directly, as the English put it, or right away, as the American lias it, a beautiful silver-mounted droska, or Rise-up-William-Riley-and-come-along-with-me phaeton, drawn by gayly caparisoned and neighing steeds, dashes up to the curb, driven by an Olive street gondolier. You bound lightly into the. beautifully flecked chariot, a tiny silver gong about the size of a railroad time-table tinkles gavly, and away you go, arousing the envy and admiration of those who have never been under arrest. But how, asks the keen and pungent reader, can St. Louis atterd to do this, while in a city like New York the criminal must either walk to the sta-tion-house or forego the joys of arrest entirely. The answer is simple. Here the criminal pays $6.50 for an arrest which he used to get at SO. This pays his drosEa hire and makes liis arrest something to look back to with pleasure. People who yield to the police and become arrested from time to time do not care for the expense. Mostly they reter the expense to a place which should be alluded to sparingly in a Sunday paper. And so the sum of $3.50 doesn’t bother them at all. They pay it if they have it,and it' they do hot,an opportunity is given (hem to earn it later on at some skilled labor like pounding sand. This makes the arrest an ornament to the city, and the gentlemanly criminal or misdemeanor obligato pays lor it, thus contributing to his own comfort and making his arrest a delicate tribute to himself which tlie papers can use, and which will read well in a scrap-book when forked over to future generations. St. Louis points with pride to her police system and methods of arrest. A New York man who eomes to St. Louis and gets arrested is treated just as well as if lie had been born here; wherdas a St. Louis man who goes to New York, when arrested, is at once looked upon with suspicion. 'llie people of St. Louis love to compare their police and arrest system with those of other cities, and to speak of Chicago with quiet scorn. 'J liey love to point with pardonable pride to their five mayors, neither one of whom dared for some time to leave town for fear one of the others v r ould be sole mayor when he got back. They also speak with some acrimony of the oldtime Chicago justice of the peace, who used to have his shrine over a gilded hell. He had a deaf and dumb waiter built in back of the bench, also a speaking tube, by means of which he c mid refer difficult points of law to a low'-browed chemist in his shirt sleeves down stairs, and so, as we say in the Rife de Bowery, he would ever and anon “roll the rock.” And it fell out that in his court justice was not only blind, but she had a bad hiccough as the day wore on, while now and then the hoarse overruling power of the justice mingled its accents with the whistle of the speaking tube and the low moau of the lip loss dumb waiter. Thus it happened that in the records of the office the stenographer has erroneously embodied in the Justice's rul-

ings such irrelevant remarks as “another hot whiskee for the coo-rt, ” and other holdings and findings of the court which have been used in Chicago and other cities as precedents in caßes of like character, to the great elevation of the bench and bar. lle*was a Justice who introduced into his administration a style of fine which has been frequently adopted by young and struggling Justices of the Peace elsewhere. For instance, two offenders are up before him for assault and battery, or something of that kind, and the court is try.ng to discover which is the off ending party. After hearing the testimony and overruling most of it, referring from time to time to his tin source of information, he looks up at the ventilator and says: “The court finds you guilty and assesses you tin dollars and trimmins, together with the remark that you will stand committed until the whole thing is fully paid.” J Then one of the men says timidly • “But, your Honor, I have no money." “S>t down! sit down, you red-eyed study in rum,” said the court, “and shut up your chaotic face. I’m talking to the other ma i.” On board a steamboat the other even-

ing a strange thing occurred. It has nothing to do with anything else, and I do not put it m here in order to teach a valuable lessop. It is just a simple unchronicled fact. A shy young man decided to abandon a venerable pair of trousers to its fate, having just secured a new pair as he went on the boat. So he said to himself, I will just drop them out of my cabin window into the remorseless tide, and all will be buried in the great, calm bosom of the old parent of waters. He lolled them up carefully and shied them far, far out over the gunwale of the boat near the bow. As they sped through the air they unfurled with a soul-piercing plunk. They filled with air and looked as they struck on the crest of the waves

like a man stooping over to peer down mto the depths of the tide. A nervous woman about midships heard the impact of the abandoned pantaloons ana looking down with a shudder said: “Me Gawd, a human being has went to his accmnt.” She then became the author of a loud yelp and all hands rushed . to the guards with the cry of “Man overboard,” that awful cry which once heard can never be forgotten. A hundred hands with boat hooks and catfish openers ran to the lower decks, and amid 'he cries of women and the quick-drawn breath of pale men, a tall roustabout jabbed the drowning man in the vitals with a jabber, and, while fainting passengers look* d the other way, he pulled out the now collapsed trousers and found on the inside of the waistband the name of the owner, also the J.eg and waist measurement, together with the name of a St. Louis tailor. Then they began to .hunt over the boat and in the dregs of the river for the man who had occupied the trousers aforetime, and that shy young man's name was in everv mouth and he didn’t dare to come down for his breakfast, and his jet black mustache, which could be distinctly st en when he left St. Louis, from fright turned around and went back a'iain.

A ST. LOUIS ARREST.

A STEAMBOAT INCIDENT.