equally abominable. The building, with its copy of Egyptian architecture, vies in gloom with the prison in Venice, though the former takes unpleasant precedence--a veritable Hall of Eblis, with thick walls, impressive portals, a general air of hopeless and portentous doom about even its exterior. There was a grimness in its dark passages that made the heart sink, truly an awe-ful building. The interior was spick and span and clean as a hospital ward, but the horror of that repellent outside leaked through somehow. Both inside and outside, the Tombs Prison became as familiar to me as my room in East 19th Street; many a prisoner I interviewed in his cell, many a wretch I talked with through the bars of his last earthly cage in Murderers' Row; I never entered the forbidding place without a shudder, nor stepped into the open air again without relief.
The routine of the police court, too, became mechanical as the months went by. The various reporters acted in concert; we agreed which stories we would use, and in this way no paper got a "beat" on the others. The man on duty stood beside the Tammany magistrate, making his notes as each case came up. It was a depressing, often a painful, business.
The cases rattled by very quickly--arson, burglary, forgery, gambling, opium dens, street women, all came up, but it was from assaults that we usually culled our morning assortment for the first edition. Negroes used a razor, Italians a stiletto, white men a knife, a pistol, a club or a sandbag. Women used hatpins mostly.
It was, of course, some particular feature, either picturesque or horrible, that lent value to a case. Gradually my "nose for news" was sharpened. It was a friendly little German Jew, named Freytag, who taught me how to make the commonest police story readable. I had just "given up" the facts about a Syrian girl who had been stabbed by a jealous lover, and the reporters all round me were jotting down the details. Freytag, who worked for Hermann Ridder's Staatszeitung, looked over my shoulder.
"That's no good," he said. "Don't begin 'Miriam so-
