Because they were penniless and hungry, Charles Ewart, 31 years old, and his wife Emily, living at 646 St. Nicholas Avenue, were arrested yesterday in the grocery store of Jacob Bosch, 336 St. Nicholas Avenue, charged with shoplifting. When arrested by Detective Taczhowski, who had trailed them all the way from a downtown department store, seven eggs and a box of figs were found in Mrs. Ewart's handsome blue fox muff....

But the cause of the couple's pilfering was not poverty or hunger, as was shown by a clever writer on the New York World who covered the story that afternoon. Here is his write-up, in which the reader should note the entire change of tone and the happy handling of the human interest features:

CONFESSED SHOPLIFTERS

Mrs. Emily Ewart, slender, petite, pretty, sat in the police department to-day, tossed back her blue fox neckpiece, patted her moist eyes with a lace-embroidered handkerchief, carefully adjusted in her lap the handsome fox muff which the police say had but lately been the repository of seven eggs and a box of figs, and told how she and her husband happened to be arrested last evening as shoplifters.

As she talked, her husband, Charles Ewart, thirty-one years old, sat disconsolately in a cell, his modish green overcoat somewhat wrinkled, the careful creases in his gray trousers a bit less apparent, and his up-to-the-minute gray fedora a trifle out of shape and dusty. Nevertheless, he still retained the mien of dignity with which he met his arrest in the grocery store of Jacob Bosch at No. 336 St. Nicholas Avenue.

Of course, you understand, it was really Mrs. Ewart's fault that she and her husband should stoop to pilfering from a hardworking grocer eggs worth 42 cents (at their market value of 72 cents a dozen) and a box of figs, net value one dime. At least, so she told the police. She too, she said, led him to appropriate a travelling bag worth $10 from a downtown department store.

If it hadn't been for her, young Mr. Ewart might have gone right along earning his so much per week soliciting theatre curtain advertisements for the Bentley Studios, at No. 1493 Broadway, and might never have run afoul of the police.

The Ewarts, so the young woman's story ran, came here from Chicago two weeks ago. Of their life in the Western city she refused to tell anything. But since coming to New York, she admitted, they had travelled a hard financial road.

Detective Taczkowski's attention was first called to Ewart in a downtown department store yesterday afternoon, when Ewart tried to return a travelling bag which he said his wife had bought for $10. Investigation of the store's records showed Mrs. Ewart had bought a bag for $3.95, but that the $10 bag had been stolen. Ewart was put off on a technicality and the detective followed him when he left the store. Outside Ewart was met by his wife. Into the subway Taczkowski shadowed them and at last the trail led to the Bosch grocery on St. Nicholas Avenue.

In the store, Taczkowski kept his eyes on Mrs. Ewart, in her modish gown and furs, while Ewart engaged a clerk in conversation. Suddenly, Taczkowski alleges, he saw an egg worth six cents disappear from a crate into Mrs. Ewart's handsome fur muff. Another egg followed, and another, he says, until, like the children of the poem, they were seven. When a box of figs followed the eggs, Taczowski says, he arrested the pair.