r bill, the amount of the fine inflicted on him
so many years before. I have always wished I knew who the man was.

The disciplinary courts were very interesting. But it was
extraordinarily difficult to get at the facts in the more complicated
cases--as must always be true under similar circumstances; for
ordinarily it is necessary to back up the superior officer who makes
the charge, and yet it is always possible that this superior officer is
consciously or unconsciously biased against his subordinate.

In the courts the charges were sometimes brought by police officers and
sometimes by private citizens. In the latter case we would get queer
insights into twilight phases of New York life. It was necessary to be
always on our guard. Often an accusation would be brought against the
policeman because he had been guilty of misconduct. Much more often the
accusation merely meant that the officer had incurred animosity by doing
his duty. I remember one amusing case where the officer was wholly to
blame but had acted in entire good faith.

One of the favorite and most demoralizing forms of gambling in New York
was policy-playing. The policy slips consisted of papers with three rows
of figures written on them. The officer in question was a huge pithecoid
lout of a creature, with a wooden face and a receding forehead, and his
accuser whom he had arrested the preceding evening was a little grig
of a red-headed man, obviously respectable, and almost incoherent with
rage. The anger of the little red-headed man was but natural, for he had
just come out from a night in the station-house. He had been arrested
late in the evening on suspicion that he was a policy-player, because of
the rows of figures on a piece of paper which he had held in his hand,
and because at the time of his arrest he had just stepped into the
entrance of the hall of a tenement-house in order to read by lamplight.
The paper was produced in evidence. There were the three rows of figures
all right, but, as the accused explained, hopping up and down with rage
and excitement, they were all of them the numbers of hymns. He was the
superintendent of a small Sunday-school. He had written down the hymns
for several future services, one under the other, and on the way home
was stopping to look at them, under convenient lamp-posts, and finally
by the light of the lamp in a tenement-house hallway; and it was this
conduct which struck the sagacious man in uniform as "susp