AFTER DARK.

Central Park on Saturday afternoon and the Tenderloin district on Saturday night give one different ideas of New York. Rather different ideas, too, of New York society, if one happens on a night when any of the Four Hundred bring up in the Thirtieth Street Police Station. Then you see him whom tailors do not bully as they do ordinary men, but bow down to as one whose whims are to set fashions, brought in, covered with mud, by some cab-driver who has failed to get his due from the drink-befuddled brain and the drink-emptied pocket.

Those who come into the station of their own accord act differently. They take off their hats and tiptoe across the room to ask if they may go upstairs to the sleeping room; and if it is full they tiptoe meekly out again. Misery is very unostentatious.

Worst of all are the old women, with their repulsiveness which almost prevents one from pitying them. I wondered, the other day, what became of all the pretty girls who walk Broadway and Sixth Avenue at night. I think I saw in the police station what became of some of them.

With the proud scions of aristocracy there is no humbleness. In some stages there is jocularity and affability; in some, haughtiness; but the end of both is the same. When the scion understands that he is to spend a night in jail the horror of it appears to him something the gods cannot allow. He remonstrates with the police captain; he mentions his pride of birth and the shame that incarceration would be to such as he; he appeals to all the police captain’s higher feelings one after the other; he speaks to him as one gentleman to another. His ignorance of the vulgar world leads him into strange mistakes. And the policeman laughs and encourages him to talk, if the night has been dull, and finally putting him into a cell, examines the inside cover of his watch to see if he has given his right name.

About an hour after midnight Detective Dugan brought in a pretty, fair-haired girl.

“What is your name?” asked the sergeant.

The girl leaned forward and her lips moved, but they trembled so she could not answer for a moment. “Fanny Kellogg,” she said faintly at last.

“Kelly?” asked the sergeant.

“No; Kel—Kel—”

“Kellogg,” said the detective for her.

“What’s your age, Fanny?” asked the sergeant.

“Twenty-five.” She did not look more than twenty; so I suppose she spoke the truth.

“Your occupation?”

There were two or three reporters near her. She looked straight ahead and did not answer at all. The sergeant waited a minute; then he asked:

“The same old thing?”

She nodded, still looking straight before her.

“Married?”

Her eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.

“That’s too bad, Fanny, you ought to get married.” He finished writing in his book, and then rang for the matron. The bell was out of order, so he sent a messenger. While waiting he said to the girl jokingly:

“Couldn’t you see that Dugan was a copper?”

She turned and looked at the detective, smiling. She looked at him from top to toe, as if to see whether her judgment had been at fault, or whether she had merely had a case of hard luck. Dugan began to blush and Fanny smiled still more. She had a pleasant face, but in the smile one could see things that the face in repose did not reveal.

There was some delay before the matron came. After the little joke on the detective had passed, Fanny’s eyes again filled with tears, which she furtively wiped away with the tips of her fingers. Then the little plump matron appeared in the doorway, beckoned to Fannie with a stiff little finger of rectitude, and they went out of the room together.

“It’s a pity she shouldn’t marry; she’s a nice girl,” said the sergeant.

“She’s pretty, too,” said a reporter.

“Her figure isn’t good enough for me,” said another.

“Oh, I guess you’d take her fast enough,” answered the sergeant.

The talk was slipping down very rapidly. Few men consider chivalry a thing to be worn all the time.

Kenneth Brown.