What has all this to do with anything?  It has to do, dear reader, with Mr. Caput Magnus, the assistant of the district attorney of the county of New York, whose duty it was to present the evidence in all criminal cases to the grand jury and make ready the instruments of torture known as bills of indictment for that august body’s action thereon.

For by all the lights of the Five Points, Chinatown—­Mulberry, Canal, Franklin, Lafayette and Centre streets—­Pontin’s Restaurant, Moe Levy’s One Price Tailoring Establishment, and even by those of the glorious days of Howe & Hummel, by the Nine Gods of Law—­and more—­Caput Magnus was a learned savant.  He and he alone of all the members of the bar on the pay roll of the prosecutor’s office, housed in their smoke-hung cubicles in the Criminal Courts Building, knew how to draw up those complicated and awful things with their barbed-wire entanglements of “saids,” “then and there beings,” “with intents,” “dids,” “to wits,” and “aforesaids” in all the verbal chaos with which the law requires those accused of crime to be “simply, clearly and directly” informed of the nature of the offense charged against them, in order that they may know what to do about it and prepare their defense.

And while we are on it—­and in order that the reader may be fully instructed and qualified to pursue Tutt & Tutt through their various adventures hereafter—­we may as well add that herein lies one of the pitfalls of crime; for the simple-minded burglar or embezzler may blithely make way with a silver service or bundle of bank notes only to find himself floundering, horse, foot and dragoons, in a quagmire of phraseology from which he cannot escape, wriggle as he will.  Many such a one has thrown up his hands—­and with them silver service, bank notes and all—­in horror at what the grand jury has alleged against him.

Indeed there is a well-authenticated tradition that a certain gentleman of color who had inadvertently acquired some poultry belonging to another, when brought to the bar and informed that he theretofore, to wit, in a specified year of our Lord in the night time of the day aforesaid, the outhouse of one Jones then and there situate, feloniously, burglariously did break into and enter with intent to commit a crime therein, to wit, the goods, chattels and personal property of the said Jones then and there being found, then and there feloniously and burglariously by force of arms and against the peace of the people to seize, appropriate and carry away, raised his voice in anguish and cried: 

“Fo de Lawd sake, jedge, Ah didn’t do none ob dem tings—­all Ah done was to take a couple ob chickens!”