Young sixteen-year-old Stewart, who was sentenced to twenty years in Sing Sing for killing a boy his own age on Randall’s Island, whose facial lineaments I often watched and studied, had a most attractive physiognomy. No one could have believed from his looks that he was a criminal, but how long he can retain these looks is a matter of conjecture. Our prisons are full of young buzzards who need to be watched continually. These boys are cunning, sly and treacherous. When you see them coming be sure and give them a wide berth. Do not believe what they tell you, even if they swear on a monument of Bibles. Most of them are in the business to lie and they know how to attend to their own business! The Untruthful Crook Nor can you rely on any of their promises. If they speak to you sweet words you will find that they have the poison of asps under the tongue. They are born buzzards and can no more change their ravenous nature than a leopard his spots. One of the earliest buzzard freaks I knew was a boy named Dietz, who was several times in the Tombs for misdemeanors before he was finally sent to Elmira for a felony. I found Dietz to be one of the most expert and finished liars ever I met. It was no trouble for him to lie in three languages! It seems that he could hardly make a statement of any kind, without crowding into it a few lies. He had a way of his own by which he could palm off on an unsuspecting missionary a harrowing tale of persecution that would bring tears to the eyes and his tales were so well arranged that all would believe them. For daring criminality he could give points to Western bandits and shame them in the end. A car load of such characters dumped on a peaceful city of fifty thousand people would disrupt it in a week. Dietz gloated on blood and thunder yarns of the wild and woolly West, most of the time and was unhappy unless he was draping demons from the cesspool of his soul. When I meet a chronic liar I readily conclude—no matter what his age may be, that the bottom has dropped out of his character. The liar is the best evidence of total depravity, and this particular characteristic of the individual cannot long be hid. The second time Dietz was an inmate of the Boys’ Prison I remember how I raced all over the city on a wild goose chase on one of his lies, not knowing at the time that his story was a fabrication from A to Z. I found out by mere accident that his brother, who was a clerk in a large shipping firm in the city, had aided him out of his first scrape, but refused the second time to have anything more to do with him. He knew this and took pains to conceal the fact that after many chances to do the square thing his brother considered him “no good.” His wanton deeds and prodigality he considered virtues and when he recited them to those who would listen to him he was in smiles.