"Yes," answered the Attorney General, "all the wrong of a serious felony has been done, but no crime has been committed. The machinery of criminal jurisprudence cannot be used for the purpose of redressing civil wrong, the distinction being that, by a fiction of law, crimes are wrongs against the State, and in order to be a crime the offence must be one of those wrongs described by the law as being against the peace and dignity of the State. If, on the other hand, the act be simply a wrong to the citizen and not of the class described as being offences against the State, it is no crime, no matter how injurious it may be or how wrongful to the individual. The entire transaction was a civil matter resulting in injury to the citizen, Woodford, but it is no crime, and is not the proper subject of an extradition." The Governor turned around in his chair. "James," he said to his private secretary, "return the application for the extradition of William Harris, and say that upon the face of the papers it is plainly evident that no crime has been committed." The blow which Fate had sought to deliver with such malicious cunning against the confidential clerk of Beaumont, Milton, & Company had been turned aside, and had fallen with all its crushing weight upon the shoulders of another man, five hundred miles to westward, within the jurisdiction of a distant commonwealth. IV--THE ERROR OF WILLIAM VAN BROOM _[The lawyer will at once see that the false making of this paper is no forgery, and that no crime has been committed. See the Virginia case of Foulke in 2 Robinson's Virginia Reports, 836; the case of Jackson vs. Weisiger, 11 Ky. (Monroe Reports), 214; and the later case of Charles Waterman vs. The People, 67 111., 91.]_ I. THE morning paper contained this extravagant personal: "Do not suicide. If you are a non-resident of New York in difficulty, at nine to-night walk east by the corner of the -------- Building with a copy of this paper in your right hand." The conservative foreigner, unfamiliar with our great dailies, would, perhaps, be surprised that the editor would print such a questionable announcement in his paper, but at this time in New York the personal column had become a very questionable directory, resorted to by all classes of mankind for every conceivable purpose, be it gain, adventure, or even crime; no one thought to question the propriety of such publications. Indeed, no one stopped to consider them at all, unless he happened to be a party in interest. II. A few minutes before the hour mentioned in the above personal, a cab came rattling down --------