Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/323

 304 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS couth woman whose appearance was not unlike that of a cave dweller of long past ages. Such happenings are not unknown in public courts of jus- tice. But the dignity of the court had been violated and the baili£f, whose duty it was to see that order was kept, made a move to eject the disturber from the court room, when the judge stopped the machinery of the law and, calling the poor woman to his side, talked with her and the boy together. He suspended the sentence and later visited them in their humble home. With the help of the mother and the cooperation of the boy himself the youth was saved from the operation of what had been previously the inexorable penalty of violated criminal law. In this way a boy, not really bad but who, in a moment of temptation, had appropriated something of trifling value, was saved from the beginnings of a criminal career. To-day he is a respected and useful member of society. Not long afterward a burglary case was set for trial in this young judge 's court. When the time came he looked around for the criminals. Three frightened boys, not one of whom was more than sixteen, were brought before him. Upon in- quiry it turned out that the burglary had been committed in a pigeon loft, the owner being a peevish old man who claimed that the boys had long annoyed him and now had robbed him of some of his choice birds. The boys said that pigeons of a choice variety belonging to them had ** taken up** with those of the old man and that they were only trying to get them back again. But this was burglary and under the criminal law boys guilty of this crime must be sent to the reformatory. Something in the appearance of the old man and the circum- stances of the case reminded the judge of his own youthful days. He asked more questions of the old man to learn the exact location of his pigeon loft. The judge was not mis- taken. He recalled that when a boy he was a member of a do mischief. His own gang had planned and successfully ex- ecuted a ** burglary'' of this same old man's pigeon loft. The judge whose duty it was now to sentence these boys to prison had once helped to plan just such a burglary himself when a J
 * gang.'' Boys instinctively associate themselves in gangs to