Miscellany

Abduction, Theft

In Manhattan, two bandits forced their way into a garage, abducted two Negro night watchmen, stole 250 cases of chewing gum.

Shrewd

In Union City, N. J., a sleek stranger, having eaten and paid for a large meal in the restaurant of one John Thanos, asked courteously if he might use the telephone. Mr. Thanos heard him give a woman's name. It was evidently a long distance call, but Mr. Thanos, not wishing to appear discourteous, did not listen to the conversation. The stranger talked for 41 minutes. Courteous Thanos polished the glasses out of earshot.

"The toll was $1.75," said the stranger, laying the exact change on the counter. "Thank you," he added courteously and departed.

A thought came to Mr. Thanos. He put a question to the long distance operator.

"He called Charleston, S. C.," she said. "The charges were $67.60."

In Chicago

Once there was a dance called the Chicago, a graceless thing of scissoring hips, jutting elbows and wild necks. It is gone now, its very memory erased by a lithe barbaric jungle shiver, to which the gentle city of Charleston lent its name, and which has now brought a savage and quite inappropriate glory to the city of Charleston. Recently Mayor Thomas Stoney of Charleston, the Mayor's wife and ten members of his cabinet journeyed to Chicago to attend the first national Charleston championship contest, and to award the silver loving cups to the winners. The Mayor said that this dance had originated among reveling black bucks and yellow girls, who pranced on spring nights under the white holiday moon along the Charleston waterfront. He asserted loudly that it had reunited forever the nation which was divided when Charleston fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. Having spoken, he sat down. The crowd applauded. A saxophone giggled.

The dance began. Charlestoners, male and female, from Akron, Cleveland, Canton, McKeesport, Pa.; from Detroit and Toledo; from Wichita, Kan., Cedar Rapids, Clinton, Davenport, Topeka, Omaha, and Waterloo, la.; from Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Fort Wayne, Joliet and Peoria, 111.; from Charleston, Little Rock, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Tulsa, Okla., branded their shinbones and burned their heels, clutched each other, pumping, weaving, while the fiddles whimpered and the drums pitapated. "CHARLEston," said the pipsqueak piccolos, "CharleSTON," sang the clariboes, "CHARLESTON." the drunken night-horns caroled, hoarse and sweet. The long-haired bimboes, the pool-parlor cowboys, street-sheiks, bullyboys, soda-jerkers, danced with their minnies from the sticks, sundae-sallies with naughty eyes. Mayor Stoney gave the prize to Freddie Danidel and Anna Duvall of Memphis as the best from the South; to Thomas Nolan, Shelba Singer of Pittsburgh, for the East; to Donald Wilson, Louise Stoner of Wichita, for the West; to Lyman Curry, Katherine Osbourne of Chicago, for the North.

Pillow

When Abraham Lincoln, with a bullet in his head, crumpled slow ly into his chair in Ford's Theatre one April night, three men carried him across the street to a little house opposite. It was the house of William Peterson, a tailor. The President lay there all night, and all night his blood seeped into the square feather pillow under his head. . . .

Peterson, the tailor, is gone but his pillow exists yellow with age and crusted still with the fatal stains. Last week the will of Tailor Peterson's daughter, Mrs. Pauline Peterson Wenzing, was probated. This Mrs. Wenzing was a girl of 13 on the night when her mother turned from the lamp and her father got up from his stitching to answer a wild knock ing at the door. It was in her own bed (on the ground floor) that the men who came tramping into the house laid their long, gaunt, helpless burden.

Mrs. Wenzing willed the pillow to a Washington schoolmistress, Mrs. Jessie F. Webster. With it went the following affidavit: "This is to certify that the pillow now in the possession of Jessie F. Webster of the City of Washing ton, D. C., is the same pillow on which President Abraham Lincoln died, April 15, 1865. His death occurred in my room in my old home, No. 516 Tenth Street, Northwest, Washington, D. C."