Meantime Prof. Rossi and his staff of assistants had been trailing the wandering Nellie. She was never out of their sight, but they never could quite catch up with her because[Pg 222] there were so many people in the streets who had important engagements and were trying their best to fill them. But by the time Nellie had moved into 340 Rossi and his force had arrived. There were also the police reserves from three stations, several fire companies with hooks and ladders, a squad of mounted cops, the entire force from the Grand Central Station, and enough mere spectators to do credit to a Chicago-New York baseball game at the Polo Grounds.
Vainly did Prof. Rossi endeavor to coax Nellie out by the way in which she had made entrance. Nothing would budge her, and if, as might well have been the case, the courtyard had been entirely surrounded by houses, it might have been necessary to pull one of them down to get her out. Fortunately, however, there’s a vacant lot behind 340, but it was needful to break down two high board fences from the Thirty-third street side in order to get at her.
In the meantime Rossi’s assistants had thoughtfully led the other three elephants, Petie, Rosa and Pierrette, down from the Hippodrome and lined them up in Thirty-third street, and when Nellie looked through the broken fences and saw her merry companions, she let out trumpet peals of delight and all but fell on their necks. So they marched her out into Thirty-third street and back to the Hippodrome without further incident of note. And considering the pains she took to get into her Thirty-fourth street tenement she left it with extraordinarily little apparent regret.
When Prof. Rossi was asked last evening how he accounted for Nellie’s performance, he replied in part:
“Name of a name! Name of a dog! Name of a pig! Sacred thousand thunders! Holy blue!”
In the separation of an old colored couple a reporter might see little to record in a news story, but, with an appreciation of the human interest in the event or with insight into the lives and feelings of the persons concerned, he might write a pathetic story like the following one adapted from the Pittsburgh Gazette Times:
They had climbed the hill together; well on the tottering way down they decided that they must travel the rest apart. Sylvester and Eva Hawkins signed papers to that effect yesterday. They are black folk, these two, old and black, but[Pg 223] they have in their natures a meed of proper sentiment. When the parting came they both wept and the tears were not maudlin.
They have lived for the most part as good citizens should; they reared a family that numbers even more than the Rooseveltian figure; they saved their little earnings until they had their modest home in addition to having given their children better than they had themselves.
But the husband and father, it was alleged, was cruel. It is not denied even by himself that Sylvester was wont to give way to outbreaks of temper. He always was sorry afterward, but sometimes regret did not make up for the harm done. It is charged that once he almost killed his son and only last Saturday choked his daughter nearly to insensibility. This last act was the cause of the son’s making the information against the old man. A preliminary hearing was held last Tuesday and the old man was committed to jail until yesterday.
The son, Sylvanus, wanted his father committed to jail for a term, but the mother would not agree to this. She admitted that she feared her husband when he became violent and that his abuse of her and her children had become unbearable. But she said she still loved him and she did not want him behind the bars. When a bill of separation was suggested she agreed.