rsing noise at a funeral on Sunday."

"Oh, hell!" ejaculated the captain. "Come to think of it, it's a crime
to spit. What man is safe?"

"It occurs to me," continued Mr. Magnus thoughtfully, "that it is a
crime under the law to build a house on another man's land; now I should
say that there was a close analogy between doing that and sleeping in
his bed."

"Hear! Hear!" commented O'Brien. "Caput Magnus, otherwise known as Big
Head, there is no doubt but that your fertile brain can easily devise a
way out of our present difficulty."

"Well, I've no time to waste on tramp cases," remarked District
Attorney Peckham. "I've something more important to attend to. Indict
this fellow and send him up quick. Charge him with everything in sight
and trust in the Lord. That's the only thing to be done. Don't bother me
about it, that's all!"

Meantime Mr. Hepplewhite became more and more agitated. Entirely against
his will and, so far as he could see, without any fault of his own, he
suddenly found himself the center of a violent and acrimonious
controversy respecting the fundamental and sacred rights of freemen
which threatened to disrupt society and extinguish the supremacy of the
dominant local political organization.

On the one hand he was acclaimed by the conservative pulpit and press as
a public-spirited citizen who had done exactly the right
thing--disinterestedly enforced the law regardless of his own
convenience and safety as a matter of principle and for the sake of the
community--a moral hero; on the other, though he was president of
several charitable organizations and at least one orphan asylum he was
execrated as a heartless brute, an oppressor of the poor, an octopus, a
soulless capitalist who fattened on the innocent and helpless and
who--Mr. Hepplewhite was a bachelor--probably if the truth could be
known lived a life of horrid depravity and crime.

Indeed there was a man named Tutt, of whom Mr. Hepplewhite had never
before heard, who publicly declared that he, Tutt, would show him,
Hepplewhite, up for what he was and make him pay with his body and his
blood, to say nothing of his money, for what he had done and caused to
be done. And so Mr. Hepplewhite became even more agitated, until he
dreamed of this Tutt as an enormous bird like the fabled roc, with a
malignant face and a huge hooked beak that some day would nip him in the
abdomen and fly, croaking, away with him. Mrs. Witherspoon had returned
to Aike