ped emotion master
you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational
judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle,
a dim-pulsing and dying organism--pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of
breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem.
There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never
arrived. Nor did Cerberus. Now for a really pretty problem--"

"But the local color?" I prodded him.

"That's right," he replied. "Keep me in the running. Well, I took my
handful of copy paper down to the railroad yards (for local color),
dangled my legs from a side-door Pullman, which is another name for a
box-car, and ran off the stuff. Of course I made it clever and brilliant
and all that, with my little unanswerable slings at the state and my
social paradoxes, and withal made it concrete enough to dissatisfy the
average citizen.

"From the tramp standpoint, the constabulary of the township was
particularly rotten, and I proceeded to open the eyes of the good
people. It is a proposition, mathematically demonstrable, that it costs
the community more to arrest, convict, and confine its tramps in jail,
than to send them as guests, for like periods of time, to the best
hotel. And this I developed, giving the facts and figures, the constable
fees and the mileage, and the court and jail expenses. Oh, it was
convincing, and it was true; and I did it in a lightly humorous fashion
which fetched the laugh and left the sting. The main objection to the
system, I contended, was the defraudment and robbery of the tramp. The
good money which the community paid out for him should enable him to
riot in luxury instead of rotting in dungeons. I even drew the figures
so fine as to permit him not only to live in the best hotel but to smoke
two twenty-five-cent cigars and indulge in a ten-cent shine each day,
and still not cost the taxpayers so much as they were accustomed to pay
for his conviction and jail entertainment. And, as subsequent events
proved, it made the taxpayers wince.

"One of the constables I drew to the life; nor did I forget a certain
Sol Glenhart, as rotten a police judge as was to be found between the
seas. And this I say out of a vast experience. While he was notorious
in local trampdom, his civic sins were not only not unknown but a crying
reproach to the townspeople. Of course I refrained from mentioning name
or habitat, drawing the picture