gentlemen’s clubs and the tea tables of the town, and in the curious way stories have, it went on and on with new embellishments at each repetition. I had a curiosity about it, not because I cared for the realistic details that might as Pooh Bah used to say, “lend an air of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” but because here was a chance to test it at first hand, and so I asked the person most heroically concerned to come and tell me of an experience that had earned for him the plaudits of many of his fellow citizens and citizenesses. And so he came. He was a social worker, as they are called, and had had the training in settlement work which is said to qualify young persons to deal professionally with the poor and wicked. He was a rather good looking young chap, with a smile about his full red lips, who lifted his mild eyes to yours with perhaps an effort at frankness too pronounced. He spoke well and fluently. One night (he said) at the close of a hard day’s work in his mission, a man came to him in evident distress. The man was a business man, in comfortable though modest circumstances, with a family of which perhaps the most interesting member was a beautiful girl of seventeen. The girl was attending a high school, where she was in one of the advanced classes, and the evening before had gone from school to spend the night at the home of a friend, a girl of her own age. The next evening, on her failure to return home, the parents became alarmed, and after unavailing inquiry at her schoolmate’s house, and in other quarters, the distraught father had appealed to the social worker. The social worker at once caused an investigation to be made, and by a process of elimination (as he said, though unlike Sherlock Holmes, he did not detail the successive steps of his logic), he concluded that the girl was in a certain quarter of the city, in fact in a certain street. He then sent for the father, told him to supply himself with sufficient money, instructed him in the part he was to play, and was careful to stipulate that if he, the social worker, were to feign drunkenness or to indulge in conduct out of keeping with his character, the father was patiently and trustingly to await results. Thereupon they set forth, and before midnight visited some thirty houses of ill fame. In the thirty-first house the suspicions of the social worker were confirmed, and, pretending to be intoxicated, he invited an inmate to accompany him, and ascended to the upper floor. He tried the doors along the hall, and finding them all open but one, and that locked, he lurched against it, broke it open, and on entering the room surprised a young woman, entirely nude, who screamed--until he muttered some word of understanding and encouragement. Meanwhile the inmate had summoned madame the proprietress, who flew up the stairs, burst into the room and emptied her revolver at the social worker.