officials, heated to the due degree of moral indignation, to bring the concupiscent to justice. I had been in England, too, when the subject was under discussion there, and this same story was told to such effect that Parliament, as hysterical as one of our own state legislatures, had been led to restore the brutality of flogging. It was always the same: some poor girl had been abducted, borne off to a brothel, ruined by men employed for that purpose, turned over to aged satyrs, and never heard of more. Of course there were variations; sometimes the girl was lured away in a motor car, sometimes by a request for assistance to some lady who had fainted, sometimes by other ruses. The story was always told vehemently, but on the authority of some inaccessible third person, to doubt or question whom was to be suspected of sympathy with the outrage. But however high the station, or unimpeachable the character of the informants, anyone who had the slightest knowledge of the rules of evidence, unless he were especially credulous, would have reason to doubt the tales. In Toledo it had its vogue. It went the rounds of gentlemen's clubs and the tea tables of the town, and in the curious way stories have, it went on and on with new embellishments at each repetition. I had a curiosity about it, not because I cared for the realistic details that might as Pooh Bah used to say, "lend an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative," but because here was a chance to test it at first hand, and so I asked the person most heroically concerned to come and tell me of an experience that
