THE SEAMY SIDE.

Waikato Times, Volume 112, Issue 18809, 3 December 1932, Page 23 (Supplement)

THE SEAMY SIDE.

TALES TO MAGISTRATE, j JOSEPH THE MISERABLE SOBS. j ' i ' (By R. E. Gorder, In London j Daily Mail.) The talkative man and the silent woman made a quaint contrast at Bow Street Police Court. Joseph had a broadcasting countenance. He was the sort of man who is so encumbered With words that he spills them all over the place. One of those melancholy men with a drooping moustache and a depressing manner, the kind of man who enjo\s bad health and soliloquises over his sorrow’s. 9 * • ® Nobody could he so miserable as .TOseph looked. Just an ordinary drunk case it was, the sort of thing that could happen to anybody’s friend; but Joseph made it something between the Weeping Wall of Jerusalem and the Day of Atonement. He took sob's from his waistcoat pocket and sighs from his sleeves. He told the story of his life and prophesied ids fate after death. He waded through the vale of tears and swam through a sea of sorrow until a nervous woman at the back of the court became hysterical. No work, no money, no friends, no family, no hope,” wailed Joseph. “You had 10s 9d when you were arrested,” observed Mr Graham Campbell, the magistrate, who listened and languished. “ Existence money, merely existence money," declared Joseph, with tears dripping from his drooping moustache. “ I cannot drink as I used to do; there was a time when I could take my drink like a man; now I am a worthless worm." What Joseph was really suffering from was what is vulgarly known as a “ hang over,” so they bound him over, and he crawled out of a dock that was damp. * # <• * Lily, the silent woman, desired solitude. She wanted to sit in a quiet cell for a week and reflect on the futility of human vanity. • “ Don’t talk,” she pleaded. “ Remand- me for a week, and leave me alone with my sins." So they remanded her and this female Trappist sought the sanctuary of silence. • * e • Many and various are the definitions of drunkenness, but the queerest 1 have heard was given by a young constable who said he thought Reginald was drunk because “ one of his eyes was bigger than the other.” Everybody was startled, including Reginald, who tentatively poked a furtive forefinger at each eye. Apart from a slightly dazed expression, Reginald’s eyes appeared normal, but there must have been sometiling in the constable's contention because Reginald, sparring jovially with a friend at one o’olook In the morning, oould not see him, and, hitting him from memory, put his fist through a greengrocer’s window in New Compton Street, Reginald said he did it it in the height of hilarity, and he oould not see eye to eye with the oonstable, who maintained that he did it wilfully.