d this has its
practical side, for if we don't know how to pronounce the words
"evanescent persiflage" we can call it "bunk" or "rot." We suspect all
college graduates. We don't want them in our business. They slink
through our lives like pickpockets fearful of detection.

What has all this to do with anything? It has to do, dear reader, with
Mr. Caput Magnus, the assistant of the district attorney of the county
of New York, whose duty it was to present the evidence in all criminal
cases to the grand jury and make ready the instruments of torture known
as bills of indictment for that august body's action thereon.

For by all the lights of the Five Points, Chinatown--Mulberry, Canal,
Franklin, Lafayette and Centre streets--Pontin's Restaurant, Moe Levy's
One Price Tailoring Establishment, and even by those of the glorious
days of Howe & Hummel, by the Nine Gods of Law--and more--Caput Magnus
was a learned savant. He and he alone of all the members of the bar on
the pay roll of the prosecutor's office, housed in their smoke-hung
cubicles in the Criminal Courts Building, knew how to draw up those
complicated and awful things with their barbed-wire entanglements of
"saids," "then and there beings," "with intents," "dids," "to wits," and
"aforesaids" in all the verbal chaos with which the law requires those
accused of crime to be "simply, clearly and directly" informed of the
nature of the offense charged against them, in order that they may know
what to do about it and prepare their defense.

And while we are on it--and in order that the reader may be fully
instructed and qualified to pursue Tutt & Tutt through their various
adventures hereafter--we may as well add that herein lies one of the
pitfalls of crime; for the simple-minded burglar or embezzler may
blithely make way with a silver service or bundle of bank notes only to
find himself floundering, horse, foot and dragoons, in a quagmire of
phraseology from which he cannot escape, wriggle as he will. Many such a
one has thrown up his hands--and with them silver service, bank notes
and all--in horror at what the grand jury has alleged against him.

Indeed there is a well-authenticated tradition that a certain gentleman
of color who had inadvertently acquired some poultry belonging to
another, when brought to the bar and informed that he theretofore, to
wit, in a specified year of our Lord in the night time of the day
aforesaid, the outhouse of one Jones then and ther