ment for himself he could. I let his lying pass. On the whole it seemed best to let him be responsible for the arrest; it made the story more commonplace, and, luckily, so far, I had not described this scene.
An hour later I was talking with Boyde between the bars of his cell in the Tombs prison, while, two hours later, every evening paper in New York had a column or a column and a half about us printed on its front page. There were scare headlines of atrocious sort. There were posters, too, showing our names in big letters. News that day happened to be scarce, and the Boyde story was "good stuff" apparently. The talk with him in the cell was one of many; he was there six weeks before the trial came on.
The papers finished him; the case was too notorious for him ever to swindle again unless he changed his name. They scarified him, they left out no detail, they hunted up a thousand new ones, he had "cut a wide swath" (sic) all over New York State, as one of them printed. I had not mentioned Pauline M---- or the pastor's daughter, yet both were included. To see my own name in print for the first time, the names of my parents, and of half the peerage as well, was bad enough; to find myself classed with bad company generally, with crooks and rogues, with shady actresses, with criminals, was decidedly unpleasant. Paragraphs my brother wrote to me appeared in London papers too. Copies of the New York ones were sent to my father. "Too foxy for Algernon" was a headline he read out to my brother in his library. Boyde had even written to him, signing himself "your cousin," to ask for money for "your poor son," but had received no reply. There is no need now to mention names, but any distinguished connexion either of us possessed appeared in the headlines or the article itself. "Nephew of an earl held in $1,000 bail," "Cousin of Lord X," "Scion of British Aristocracy a Sneak-thief," were some of the descriptions. "Son of a duchess in the Soup," was another. The Staatszeitung had a phrase which threw a momentary light on an aspect of lower life in the city,
when Freytag, the German reporter who had taught me
