d be detected when he called
for his mail. The district attorney, the police, and the post-office
officials finally evolved the scheme of plugging the lock of "Lewis
Jarvis's" box with a match. The scheme worked, for "Jarvis," finding
that he could not use his key, went to the delivery window and asked for
his mail. The very instant the letters reached his hand the gyves were
upon the wrists of one of the best-known attorneys in the city.

When the district attorney has been apprised that a crime has been
committed, and that a certain person is the guilty party, he not
infrequently allows the suspect to go his way under the careful watch
of detectives, and thus often secures much new evidence against him. In
this way it is sometimes established that the accused has endeavored
to bribe the witnesses and to induce them to leave the State, while
the whereabouts of stolen loot is often discovered. In most instances,
however, the district attorney begins where the police leave off, and
he merely supplements their labors and prepares for the actual trial
itself. But the press he has always with him, and from the first moment
after the crime up to the execution of the sentence or the liberation of
the accused, the reporters dog his footsteps, sit on his doorstep, and
deluge him with advice and information.

Now a curious feature about the evidence "worked up" by reporters for
their papers is that little of it materializes when the prosecutor
wishes to make use of it. Of course, some reporters do excellent
detective work, and there are one or two veterans attached to the
criminal courts in New York City who, in addition to their literary
capacities, are natural-born sleuths, and combine with a knowledge of
criminal law, almost as extensive as that of a regular prosecutor, a
resourcefulness and nerve that often win the case for whichever side
they espouse. I have frequently found that these men knew more about the
cases which I was prosecuting than I did myself, and a tip from them has
more than once turned defeat into victory. But newspaper men, for one
reason or another, are loath to testify, and usually make but poor
witnesses. They feel that their motives will be questioned, and are
naturally unwilling to put themselves in an equivocal position.
The writer well remembers that in the Mabel Parker case, where the
defendant, a young and pretty woman, had boasted of her forgeries before
a roomful of reporters, it was impossible