"Ask your pardon. I took no dinner up stairs. I went up with an empty stomach. An excruciating stomachical void. 'Nature abhors a vacuum,' says philosophy; and, to borrow the apothegmatic utterance of that philosopher, Dan Brown, 'Dat's what's de matter.'" "I must be plain, I see. You are Jack Vinton, and are up to your old tricks. You have come here, eaten a tip-top dinner, and were coolly walking away, with no thought of paying for it." Jack saw he was in for it. He offered to pay for his dinner, and attempted by bribery to effect what he had hoped to effect by colossal cheekiness of action and tongue; but his antecedental history was self-crushing, like the mad ambition of the great Cæsar. He was conveyed to the Second District Police Court, and committed to answer this and other graver offences of swindling, of which he is supposed to be guilty. Jack is only twenty-three years old, and is a master-swindler. Of good family, he has been well educated, and to fine looks adds the manners of a polished gentleman; while in artistic culture and familiarity with the classics, scientific studies and polite and poetical literature, he has few equals of his years. His dashing form is often seen on Broadway--the envied of his own sex and the admired of the opposite sex. His career betrays a wonderful and perverse mingling of the finest intellectual endowments and culture with the meanest and most pitiable traits of low and dishonest natures. He is a sort of Lord Bacon, on a vastly reduced scale of brilliancy. As philosophy delves the mysterious problem, she finds only "darkness to shadow round about it." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A SUSPECTED CALIFORNIA MURDERER. -------------- ARRESTED--CHARGED WITH KILLING FOUR MEN; A GERMAN, FOR HIS MONEY, AND TWO SHERIFFS AND A DRIVER, WHO WERE CONVEYING HIM TO PRISON. The following article is taken from the New York Dispatch (1861), and serves to illustrate the sagacity of Officer McWatters in "picking out his man" in a crowd. A young man named Velge, lately from California, was arrested at the pier of the Ocean Mail Steamship Company by Officers McWatters and Hartz, of the Steamboat Squad, and taken to Police Headquarters, where he has been since detained, till the matter can undergo examination before a magistrate. The report, as obtained from an officer at the central office, is substantially as follows:-- About eighteen months since, a German, residing in Sacramento, was murdered under circumstances of extraordinary brutality. He was mild and inoffensive, said no extenuation appeared to exist for the atrocious crime. He had saved some money, which the assassin had taken, but the amount was hardly sufficient to induce an ordinary bravo to attempt his life, or otherwise disturb him.