One Cure For Vagrancy

1900

Policeman's Simple Scheme to Make Door-Sleepers Move On

The New York police force is credited with being one of the best in the world, but at least one member of it is a genius born for greater things. He has invented a method for ridding his beat of vagrants and doorstep sleepers.

This officer is attached to the Church street station, and patrols in the neighborhood of Washington street and the Battery, where cheap lodging houses, small beer saloons, "labor agencies," and the genuine "Weary Willie" luxuriantly abound, so he has almost daily opportunity to test his invention.

The vagrant is not particular where he sleeps, so that it costs nothing, and doorways are favorite lodging places. It was a sleeper in one of these that received a never-to-be-forgotten shock the other day. He was asleep in the doorway of a saloon, with his head thrown back against the jamb and his legs sprawled over the pavement. "Watch me make him more on," said the inventor. His hand went under his coat-tails, and it looked as if he were going for his gun in deadly earnest.

A spectator stood petrified, waiting to see a bloody tragedy enacted, but the bluecoat pulled out a small vial, and leaning over the sleeper, poured some of the contents on his thick, reddish mustache. The effect was electrical. With a wild snort and a gurgling gasp the hitherto inert figure sprang into the air and clawed at his mouth and throat; the tears streamed out of his eyes, which were distended with terror, and he stood gasping and making horrible faces and still clawing frantically at his mouth and throat, while the policeman smiled grimly and waited for the customary denouement. It came in a moment.

As soon as the terrorized doorstep lodger had recovered enough of his breath to permit his moving he started hurriedly up Washington street, sans coat, sans hat, sans everything but a consuming desire to put as much distance between himself and that door as possible.

The policeman laughed heartily as he watched the rapidly retreating figure. "I'll bet he don't come back here again," he said. That dose'll last him for a month. Ammonia's a great thing. It's better than insect powder, and it saves making arrests. That fellow is not only obeying the move-on ordinance, but the dose sobered him up, to boot." — New York Mail and Express.