The Sergeant reached with his left hand for the inkstand, while his right clutched the ruler. He never took his eyes off the stranger. "Say," wheedled he, glancing around and seeing no trap, "Serg, I say: that woman w'at's locked up, she's--" "She's what?" asked the Sergeant, getting the range as well as he could. "My wife," said the fellow. There was a bang, the slamming of a door, and the room was empty. The doorman came running in, looked out, and up and down the street. But nothing was to be seen. There is no record of what became of the third husband of Mary Donovan. The first slept serenely in the jail. The woman herself, when she saw the iron bars in the Elizabeth Street station, fell into hysterics and was taken to the Hudson Street Hospital. Reilly was arraigned in the Tombs Police Court in the morning. He paid his fine and left, protesting that he was her only husband. He had not been gone ten minutes when Claimant No. 4 entered. "Was Sarah Joyce brought here?" he asked Clerk Betts. The clerk couldn't find the name. "Look for Mary Donovan," said No. 4. "Who are you?" asked the clerk. "I am Sarah's husband," was the answer. Clerk Betts smiled, and told the man the story of the other three. "Well, I am blamed," he said. MERRY CHRISTMAS IN THE TENEMENTS It was just a sprig of holly, with scarlet berries showing against the green, stuck in, by one of the office boys probably, behind the sign that pointed the way up to the editorial rooms. There was no reason why it should have made me start when I came suddenly upon it at the turn of the stairs; but it did. Perhaps it was because that dingy hall, given over to dust and draughts all the days of the year, was the last place in which I expected to meet with any sign of Christmas; perhaps it was because I myself had nearly forgotten the holiday. Whatever the cause, it gave me quite a turn. I stood, and stared at it. It looked dry, almost withered. Probably it had come a long way. Not much holly grows about Printing-House Square, except in the colored supplements, and that is scarcely of a kind to stir tender memories. Withered and dry, this did. I thought, with a twinge of conscience, of secret little conclaves of my children, of private views of things hidden from mamma at the bottom of drawers, of wild flights when papa appeared unbidden in the door, which I had allowed for once to pass unheeded. Absorbed in the business of the office, I had hardly thought of Christmas coming on, until now it was here. And this sprig of holly on the wall that had come to remind me,--come nobody knew how far,--did it grow yet in the beech-wood clearings, as it did when I gathered it as a boy, tracking through the snow? "Christ-thorn" we called it in our Danish tongue. The red berries, to our simple faith, were the drops of blood that fell from the Saviour's brow as it drooped under its cruel crown upon the cross.