PRETTY PARLOR MAID
DEALS DEATH-DRINK
TO CLUBMAN'S FAMILY

The English reader would ask at once, how do we know that the parlor
maid is pretty? We don't. But our artistic sense tells us that she
ought to be. Pretty parlor maids are the only ones we take any
interest in: if an ugly parlor maid poisoned her employer's family we
should hang her. Then again, the English reader would say, how do we
know that the man is a clubman? Have we ascertained this fact
definitely, and if so, of what club or clubs is he a member? Well, we
don't know, except in so far as the thing is self-evident. Any man
who has romance enough in his life to be poisoned by a pretty
housemaid ought to be in a club. That's the place for him. In fact,
with us the word club man doesn't necessarily mean a man who belongs
to a club: it is defined as a man who is arrested in a gambling den;
or fined for speeding a motor or who shoots another person in a hotel
corridor. Therefore this man must be a club man. Having settled the
heading, we go on with the text:

"Brooding over love troubles which she has hitherto refused to
divulge under the most grilling fusillade of rapid-fire questions
shot at her by the best brains of the New York police force, Miss
Mary De Forrest, a handsome brunette thirty-six inches around the
hips, employed as a parlor maid in the residence of Mr. Spudd Bung, a
well-known clubman forty-two inches around the chest, was arrested
yesterday by the flying squad of the emergency police after having,
so it is alleged, put four ounces of alleged picrate of potash into
the alleged coffee of her employer's family's alleged breakfast at
their residence on Hudson Heights in the most fashionable quarter of