We boys got square, too, with the watchmen. We knew their habit of stowing themselves away in the stage-coach that stood in the market-place when they had cried the hour at ten o'clock, and we caught them napping there one dark night when we were coming home from a party. The stage had doors that locked on the outside. We slammed them shut and ran the conveyance, with them in it wildly gesticulating from the windows, through the main street of the town, amid the cheers of the citizens whom the racket aroused from their slumbers. We were safe enough. The watchmen were not anxious to catch us, maddened as they were by our prank, and they were careful not to report us either. I chuckled at that exploit more than once when, in years long after, I went the rounds of the midnight streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt, as they called New York's Police Commissioner, to find his patrolmen sleeping soundly on their posts when they should have been catching thieves. Human nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so different, after all, in the old world and in the new.
With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end. In that night, if a girl would know her fate, she must go to bed walking backward and throw a shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her pillow, I forget which, perhaps both, and say aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy Kings to show her the man
Whose table I must set, Whose bed I must spread, Whose name I must bear, Whose bride I must be.
The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to be her husband. There was no escape from it, and consequently she did not try. He was her Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for worse. Let us hope that the Nisse played her no scurvy trick, and that it was for better always.
"The prisoner will stand," droned out the clerk in the Court of General Sessions. "Filippo Portoghese, you are convicted of assault with intent to kill. Have you anything to say why sentence should not be passed upon you?"
A sallow man with a hopeless look in his heavy eyes rose slowly in his seat and stood facing the judge. There was a pause in the hum and bustle of the court as men turned to watch the prisoner. He did not look like a man who would take a neighbor's life, and yet so nearly had he done so, of set purpose it had been abundantly proved, that his victim would carry the disfiguring scar of the bullet to the end of his life, and only by what seemed an almost miraculous chance had escaped death. The story as told by witnesses and substantially uncontradicted was this: