rted District Attorney Peckham to the circle of
disgruntled police officers and assistants gathered about him on the
occasion described by the reporters as his making a personal
investigation of the case, "Why in the name of common sense didn't you
simply boot the fellow into the street?"

"I wish we had, counselor!" assented the captain of the Hepplewhite
precinct mournfully. "But we thought he was a burglar. I guess he was,
at that--and it was Mr. Hepplewhite's house."

"I've heard that until I'm sick of it!" retorted Peckham.

"One thing is sure--if we turn him out now Tutt will sue us all for
false arrest and put the whole administration on the bum," snarled
O'Brien.

"But I didn't know the tramp would get Mr. Tutt to defend him,"
expostulated the captain. "Anyhow, ain't it a crime to go to sleep in
another man's bed?"

"If it ain't it ought to be!" declared his plain-clothes man
sententiously. "Can't you indict him for burglary?"

"You can indict all day; the thing is to convict!" snapped Peckham.
"It's up to you, O'Brien, to square this business so that the law is
vindicated--somehow It must be a crime to go into a house on Fifth
Avenue and use it as a hotel. Why, you can't cross the street faster
than a walk these days without committing a crime. Everything's a
crime."

"Sure thing," agreed the captain. "I never yet had any trouble finding a
crime to charge a man with, once I got the nippers on him."

"That's so," interjected the plain-clothes man. "Did you ever know it
was a crime to mismanage a steam boiler? Well, it is."

"Quite right," agreed Mr. Magnus, the indictment clerk. "The great
difficulty for the perfectly honest man nowadays is to avoid some act or
omission which the legislature has seen fit to make a crime without his
knowledge. Refilling a Sarsaparilla bottle, for instance, or getting up
a masquerade ball or going fishing or playing on Sunday or loitering
about a building to overhear what people are talking about inside--"

"That's no crime," protested the captain scornfully.

"Yes, it is too!" retorted Mr. Magnus, otherwise known to his fellows as
Caput, because of his supposed cerebral inflation. "Just like it is a
crime to have any kind of a show or procession on Sunday except a
funeral, in which case it's a crime to make a disbursing noise at it."

"What's a disbursing noise?" demanded O'Brien.

"I don't know," admitted Magnus. "But that's the law anyway. You can't
make a disbu