Note 28 — FOOTNOTES:

The writer's colleague, Mr. Charles Cooper Nott, Jr., has recorded, as follows, the actual proceedings of an ordinary court day:

"Maria Dzialozindky takes the stand and swears that after a brief acquaintance she married (as she supposed) the defendant before a rabbi of his choosing; a man in charge of an officer is identified by her as the rabbi; he is brought over from the penitentiary on Blackwell's Island where he is serving a sentence for larceny, being a thief and not a rabbi; Maria then goes on to relate how the defendant then procured from her one hundred and forty-nine dollars, and disappeared, leaving her alone in the Suffolk Street tenement which was to have been their connubial bower of bliss; it further appears that the defendant had a wife living at the time that he went through the ceremony of a mock marriage with Maria. Defendant takes the stand, modestly admits that he is possessed of such unusual attractions that Maria persecuted him into this marriage; that she forced the one hundred and forty-nine dollars upon him, and that he unfortunately slumbered in a saloon and it was stolen from his person. The jury fail to give credence to his tale, and promptly convict him. The next defendant is smooth and well dressed, a hanger-on in the region known as the Tenderloin. Testimony is given that he and another did take and carry away and sell certain typewriting machines from an office in Thirty-fourth Street. Defendant with an engaging smile tells how his companion had just been discharged from the office in question, and had enlisted his (defendant's) aid to remove the machines, which he informed defendant were his own, and how shocked he was later to learn that this wicked companion had no right or title to them. His smile is so engaging, and his looks so respectable, that the jury acquit him, and are somewhat chagrined when the judge, in discharging him, states that in the court's opinion he is a smooth and plausible thief and guilty beyond a doubt—which is the fact, as previous to the trial he had offered to plead guilty to a lower degree of the crime charged. Next comes a stalwart Irishman who describes with much feeling how the defendant (unfortunately a much smaller man), without any provocation whatever, viciously assaulted him in the hallway of the West Side tenement-house where they both lived, and cut him in various vital parts with a pocket knife. Defendant (bandaged to no less a degree than complainant) describes how he had "an argument" (a term embracing any affray ending in anything short of murder in the first degree) with complainant and his brother over a game of cards, whereupon they followed him to the hallway, threw him down and kicked him, and then struck at them with a large key. His talk sounding reasonable and being corroborated by several neighbors, defendant is acquitted. Lastly, an unsuspecting passenger and an alert trolley-car conductor tell how defendant, a shifty-looking young gentleman, while sitting next to the unsuspecting passenger, kept with one hand a newspaper shoved under the latter's chin, while with the other he abstracted a fine diamond scarf pin adorning his cravat. When their tale is completed, the defendant and his counsel put their respective heads together, and counsel then announces that his client, the sole support of a widowed mother, did, in a moment of temptation induced by filial anxiety, endeavor to acquire this pin, and he therefore desires to throw himself upon the mercy of the court and plead guilty, which he does. It appears, however (of course to counsel's astonishment), that his portrait has for several years ornamented the Rogues' Gallery, and that his record as a son is not all that it might be, whereupon he is sentenced upon the spot, and court adjourns. This is the summary of the actual record of a court day presenting no unusual features"—"In the District Attorney's Office," Atlantic Monthly for April, 1905.