the slightest sign from you." Another letter made a direct reference to the communication that Mr. Brinkerhoff had forwarded and to its contents. Those annoyances continued, while the close watch kept upon Mrs. Amory's movements justified the belief that she was expected to consult a lawyer with intent to secure a divorce. On May 4th Mrs. Amory received an exact duplicate of the Washington letter of December 3d, even the cancellation mark on the postage stamp being most cleverly imitated in india-ink. Accompanying this was a letter signed "M. R.," urging Mrs. Amory to investigate her husband's actions.

Col. Amory now made a series of tests to determine absolutely whether the mails were being tampered with. He found that seals were no protection to letters addressed to him and that even registered letters were opened en route. He also discovered that whenever he or one of his family mailed a letter in a street letter box some one immediately appeared and put into the box a yellow envelope of a peculiar design. He learned from a post-office inspector to whom he complained of these things that post-office detectives used these yellow envelopes to indicate the posting of a letter by a suspected person that they were watching,

Hence it was obvious that these envelopes were now being used to indicate to someone in the postal service the position of a letter from Col. Amory.

These annoyances continued about two years. When Col. Amory published an account of them the public received the story with utter incredulity. What! Detectives and spies opening letters and tampering with the mails? In this day? Impossible! The man must be mad or dreaming. So people said, and Col. Amory suffered still further in his standing and his charges against the Metropolitan seemed lighter than ever.

And yet in both matters he was destined to have a signal vindication. When the Public Service Commission took up the testimony of Brady concerning the Wall and Cortland Street ferries line, it struck upon the identical thing that Col. Amory had from the first insisted was the practice of the Metropolitan insiders and found ample reason to believe that all his statements pertaining thereto were correct. And a little later the man that in the Metropolitan service has charge of such pleasant matters admitted on the stand that Col. Amory's story about the detectives was equally correct.

For this work the funds belonging to the Metropolitan stockholders had been used. The cost

was charged to the same account as the expenses of the Civic Federation's Committee, which went abroad (at the instigation of the public utility corporations) and reported Municipal Ownership in Europe to be a failure.

Perhaps the defrauded stockholder that now contemplates the destruction of his holdings under the reorganization that will follow the receivership may be consoled to learn thus definitely what has become of a part of his money.

As to the tampering with the mails and the apparent collusion in the post-office service, I do not pretend to know the exact methods by which such things can be brought about. Only I do know that this is not the first time persons concerned in these events have been able to exert some influence over the operations of Government.

To see how fortunate they have been in this regard it is only necessary to revert for a moment to the story of the State Trust Company.

CHAPTER XIX

SIDE-LIGHTS ON CIVILIZATION IN A GREAT CITY

OUT West, and in other regions to which we in the metropolis are apt to refer at times with a fat and complacent superiority, a street-car drawn with horses has long been a curiosity for antiquarians, a strange relic of dead ages, a reminiscence of the times before electricity was heard of, when men lived in sod houses and wore coonskin shirts.

Is it not strange then that in New York City there should still be miles upon miles of street-railroad operated exactly as street-railroads were operated sixty years ago and with about the same cars -and horses? Yet such is the fact. The people of a thousand small towns on the prairies or in the mountains can ride in swiftly moving trolley-cars; the people of a large part of New York City are condemned to antique rattle-traps of our greatgrandfathers. Of the street-railroad mileage that in the State of New York is still operated with

horse-power about ninety per cent. lies in the city the largest and haughtiest on this continent and almost the largest in the world.

For this extraordinary fact try to imagine if you can one other reason except that the money that should have gone to modernizing these railroads has been swallowed up in interest charges and dividends on watered stocks and bonds; try to imagine, if you can, one other reason why the public must bear the burden of this outworn and inadequate equipment.

One of these New York City lines that still cling to the methods of medievalism is the line that runs eastward in Twenty-eighth Street and westward in Twenty-ninth, and standing at the corner of Madison Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street one afternoon last winter this archaic relic afforded me a very strange and I think an instructive spectacle.

There was beginning a howling blizzard from the northwest. Very likely you know or can imagine how the wind tears through the east and west streets when that kind of affliction descends upon us. The snow drove heavily and as if shot from a gun. There came along the street a perfect old Noah's ark of a car, battered, scratched, visibly