"Do you want him?" asked Suydam.
"Don't we?" the policeman replied, promptly. "We've got to bring him in."
"What has he done?" De Ruyter inquired.
"Oh, he's done enough!" responded the officer. "He murdered his wife last week, that's what he's done."
Suydam looked at De Ruyter.
"Yes," said De Ruyter, "that completes the picture. I can get a good mot de la fin now."
(1893.)
BEFORE THE BREAK OF DAY
HE lived in a little wooden house on the corner of the street huddled in the shadow of two towering tenements. There are a few frail buildings of this sort still left in that part of the city, half a mile east of the Bowery and half a mile south of Tompkins Square, where the architecture is as irregular, as crowded, and as little cared for as the population. Amid the old private houses erected for a single family, and now violently altered to accommodate eight or ten—amid the tall new tenements, stark and ugly—here and there one can still find wooden houses built before the city expanded, half a century old now, worn and shabby and needlessly ashamed in the presence of every new edifice no better than they. With the peak of their shingled roofs they are pathetic survivals of a time when New York still remembered that it had been New Amsterdam, and when it did not build its dwellings in imitation of the polyglot loftiness of the Tower of Babel. It was in one of these little houses with white clapboarded walls, ashen gray in the paling moonlight, that Maggie O'Donnell lay fast asleep, when the bell in a far-off steeple tolled three in the morning of the day that was to be the Fourth of July.