The sergeant himself could not tell how it could have got in there, while stoutly maintaining that it was a keg. He scratched his head and concluded that it might have come over the roof or, somehow, from a building that is in course of erection next door. The chowder had come in by the main door. At least, one policeman had seen it carried up-stairs. He had fallen in behind it immediately. When the commissioner had heard this story told exactly twenty times the platoon fell in and marched off to the elevated station. When he can decide what punishment to inflict on a policeman who does not know a beer-keg when he sees it, they all will be fined accordingly, and a door-man who has served a term as a barkeeper will be sent to the East One Hundred and Fourth street station to keep the police there out of harm's way. SPOONING IN DYNAMITE ALLEY Dynamite Alley is bereft. Its spring spooning is over. Once more the growler has the right of way. But what good is it, with Kate Cassidy hiding in her third floor back, her "steady" hiding from the police, and Tom Hart laid up in hospital with two of his "slats stove in," all along of their "spieling"? There will be nothing now to heave a brick at on a dark night, and no chance for a row for many a day to come. No wonder Dynamite Alley is out of sorts. It got its name from the many rows that traveled in the wake of the growler out and in at the three-foot gap between brick walls, which was a garden walk when the front house was young and pansies and spiderwort grew in the back lot. These many years a tenement has stood there, and as it grew older and more dilapidated, rows multiplied and grew noisier, until the explosive name was hooked to the alley by the neighbors, and stuck. It was long after that that the Cassidys, father and daughter, came to live in it, and also the Harts. Their coming wrought no appreciable change, except that it added another and powerful one to the dynamic forces of the alley--jealousy. Kate is pretty. She is blonde and she is twenty. She greases plates in a pie bakery in Sullivan street by day, and so earns her own living. Of course she is a favorite. There isn't a ball going on that she doesn't attend, or a picnic either. It was at one of them, the last of the Hounds' balls, that she met George Finnegan. There weren't many hours after that when they didn't meet. He made the alley his headquarters by day and by night. On the morning after the ball he scandalized it by spooning with Kate from daybreak till nine o'clock. By the middle of the afternoon he was back again, and all night, till every one was asleep, he and Kate held the alley by main strength, as it were, the fact being that when they were in it no one could pass. Their spooning blocked it, blocked the way of the growler. The alley called it mean, and trouble began promptly.