arrest, there remain one hundred persons murdered, not only by persons insane or wild from the effects of liquor, but by robbers and burglars, brutes, bullies, and thugs, husbands, wives, and lovers, and by a vast number of people who not only destroyed their enemies in the fury of anger, but in many instances openly went out gunning for them, lay in wait for them in the dark, or hacked off their heads with hatchets while they slept.

It is, indeed, a sanguinary record, from which little consolation is to be derived, and the only comfort is the probability that the accounts of the first one hundred murders anywhere in Europe would undoubtedly be just as blood-curdling.  I had simply asked the clipping bureau to send me one hundred horrors and I had got them.  They did not indicate anything at all so far as the ratio of homicide to population was concerned or as to the bloodthirstiness of Americans in general.  They merely showed what despicable things murders were.

As to the reasons for the killings, they were as diverse as those which Mr. Nott had prosecuted, save that there were more of an ultra blood-thirsty character, due probably to the fact that the young lady who did the clipping wanted (after one rebuff) to make sure that I was satisfied with the goods she sent me.  And this suggests a reason for the large percentage of cold-blooded killings prosecuted by my friend—­namely, that Mr. Nott being the most astute prosecutor available, the district attorney, whenever the latter had a particularly atrocious case, sent it to him in order that the defendant might surely get his full deserts.

The reasons for these homicides were of every sort; police officers and citizens were shot and killed by criminals trying to make “get-aways,” and by negroes and others “running amuck”; despondent young men shot their unresponsive sweethearts and then either blew out their own brains of pretended to try to do so; two stable-men had a duel with revolvers, and each killed the other; several men were shot for being too attentive to young women residing in the same hotels; an Italian, whose wife had left him and gone to her mother, went to the house and killed her, her sister, her sister’s husband, his mother-in-law, two children, and finally himself; the “Gopher Gang” started a riot at a “benefit” dance given to a widow and killed a man, after which they fled to the woods and fired from cover upon the police until eighteen were overpowered and arrested; a young girl and her fiance, sitting in the parlor, planning their honeymoon, were unexpectedly interrupted by a rejected suitor of the girl’s, who shot and killed both of them; an Italian who peeked into a bedroom, just for fun, afterward rushed in and cut off two persons’ heads with an ax—­one of them was his wife; a gang of white ruffians shot and then burned a negro family of three peacefully working in the fields; a man who went to the front door to see who had tapped on his window was shot through