It was, of course, some particular feature, either picturesque or horrible, that lent value to a case. Gradually my “nose for news” was sharpened. It was a friendly little German Jew, named Freytag, who taught me how to make the commonest police story readable. I had just “given up” the facts about a Syrian girl who had been stabbed by a jealous lover, and the reporters all round me were jotting down the details. Freytag, who worked for Hermann Ridder’s _Staatszeitung_, looked over my shoulder. “That’s no good,” he said. “Don’t begin ‘Miriam so-and-so, living at such a place, was stabbed at two o’clock this morning by Whatshisname....’ That’s not interesting. Begin like this: ‘A mysterious crime with an exotic touch about it was committed in the early hours this morning when all worthy New Yorkers were enjoying their beauty sleep.... Far away, where the snows of the Taurus Mountains gleam to heaven, the victim, a lovely Syrian maid, once had her home....’” I followed his advice, though my version was severely blue-pencilled, but his point--selecting a picturesque angle of attack--was sound and useful. The police court work was over by half-past ten, and I was then generally sent on to report the trials in Special or General Sessions. These, naturally, were of every sort and kind. Divorce, alienation of affection and poison trials were usually the best news. My hair often stood on end, and some of the people were very unpleasant to interview. The final talk before a man went to the Chair was worst of all. If the case was an important one, I had to get an interview in the Tombs Prison cell before the day’s trial--there was no _sub judice_ prohibition in New York. Inevitably, I formed my own opinion as to a man’s innocence or guilt; the faces, gazing at me through bars, would often haunt me for days. Carlyle Harris, calm, indifferent, cold as ice, I still see, as he peered past the iron in Murderers’ Row, protesting his innocence with his steely blue eyes fixed on mine; he was a young medical student accused of poisoning his wife with morphia; he was electrocuted ... and Lizzie Borden ... though this was in Providence, Rhode Island--who took all her clothes off, lest the stains of blood betray her, before killing her father and mother in their sleep....