who did not give his name, said that he was a policeman, that I had once had him before me on charges, and had fined him twenty dollars; that, as a matter of fact, he had not committed the offense for which I fined him, but that the evidence was such that he did not wonder that I had been misled, and never blamed me for it, because I had acted squarely and had given honest and decent men a chance in the Police Department; and that now he inclosed a twenty-dollar bill, the amount of the fine inflicted on him so many years before.  I have always wished I knew who the man was.

The disciplinary courts were very interesting.  But it was extraordinarily difficult to get at the facts in the more complicated cases—­as must always be true under similar circumstances; for ordinarily it is necessary to back up the superior officer who makes the charge, and yet it is always possible that this superior officer is consciously or unconsciously biased against his subordinate.

In the courts the charges were sometimes brought by police officers and sometimes by private citizens.  In the latter case we would get queer insights into twilight phases of New York life.  It was necessary to be always on our guard.  Often an accusation would be brought against the policeman because he had been guilty of misconduct.  Much more often the accusation merely meant that the officer had incurred animosity by doing his duty.  I remember one amusing case where the officer was wholly to blame but had acted in entire good faith.

One of the favorite and most demoralizing forms of gambling in New York was policy-playing.  The policy slips consisted of papers with three rows of figures written on them.  The officer in question was a huge pithecoid lout of a creature, with a wooden face and a receding forehead, and his accuser whom he had arrested the preceding evening was a little grig of a red-headed man, obviously respectable, and almost incoherent with rage.  The anger of the little red-headed man was but natural, for he had just come out from a night in the station-house.  He had been arrested late in the evening on suspicion that he was a policy-player, because of the rows of figures on a piece of paper which he had held in his hand, and because at the time of his arrest he had just stepped into the entrance of the hall of a tenement-house in order to read by lamplight.  The paper was produced in evidence.  There were the three rows of figures all right, but, as the accused explained, hopping up and down with rage and excitement, they were all of them the numbers of hymns.  He was the superintendent of a small Sunday-school.  He had written down the hymns for several future services, one under the other, and on the way home was stopping to look at them, under convenient lamp-posts, and finally by the light of the lamp in a tenement-house hallway; and it was this conduct which struck the sagacious man in uniform as “suspicious.”