OVERSLEPT IN A THEATRE

It befel^[1] Samuel Lippman to become bored with the performance at the Windsor Theatre on Friday evening. Therefore he went to sleep. Being a hard and conscientious sleeper, he slept until the final curtain fell and after. As he didn’t snore or otherwise slumber in a disorderly manner, nobody wakened him during the play, and when it was over he was forgotten. The crowd passed out, leaving Samuel still getting his money’s worth out of that seat. The ushers departed and the caretaker put out the lights, and still Samuel slept.

At 2 o’clock he woke up and rubbed his eyes. At first he thought dimly that he was at home in his 20-cent bunk at the Mascot Hotel, but the fact of his being in a chair didn’t coincide with this theory. He attempted to rise, and, colliding with the chair in front of him, sank rapidly back again. Then his thoughts collected. He remembered where he was, and ingeniously guessed that the house had been darkened while some presto change business was in progress on the stage.

While he had never been present at anything of that kind before, he had heard of it ; but it struck him that it was being done with extraordinary quiet. In fact, there was a superabundant quietude all about him, a sort of intangible lack of companionship that wore upon his spirit. Thrusting out a tentative elbow he explored the person in the seat next to him. There was nobody there.

Samuel felt the darkness closing about his throat so plainly that he gulped, and that gulp rang emptily through the house and reverberated in corners infinitely distant. Undoubtedly, thought Samuel, that would create a sensation in the house. In fact, he rather hoped it would. He wanted something to happen very badly. Nothing happened. He tried with his other elbow, and found more nothingness. Then he arose and quoted that passage much used by persons in a similar fix :

“ Where am I ?”

No reply came. Stiff with sleep and aquiver with fear. Samuel arose and essayed to pass out to the aisle, whereupon long rows of seats ranges themselves in his path, and he fell over them all. Several thousand demons in another part of the building announced themselves with horrible vociferousness and started out to find Samuel. With one wild shriek of despair he plunged forward in search of an escape from the fiends whose clamorings and the clawings of whose feet he could hear growing nearer.

Now Samuel had not been the only person asleep in the building. The other was Richard Horst, whose business is to sleep in the theatre because he is the janitor. His slumbers were rudely terminated by the howlings of his three dogs, with a high soprano obligato in a strained and unknown voice. Richard climbed out of bed, added a club and a candle to his stock of apparel, and went forth into the darkness.

When he reached the parquet he dimly beheld a form crawling through a window while the dog raged below. Outside the window was a fire escape. Samuel attached himself to the fire escape and descended. Richard climbed up to the window and descended the fire escape also. Then they both jaunted merrily across the roofs. Perhaps it was because of the lighter raiment of the janitor that he overtook Samuel.

“ I paid to get in,” said Samuel.

“ You didn’t pay no night’s lodging,” said Richard. “ Police !”

Samuel and Policeman O’Sullivan went to the Eldridge street station together and thence to Essex Market Court, thereby giving an opportunity to Magistrate Mott yesterday morning to give another exhibition of his singular genius for justice. For upon Samuel’s telling his story the Magistrate discharged him. Policeman O’Sullivan was running this case, however. He had had to climb a roof in order to get the prisoner, and he wanted the honor of a conviction. Therefore he promptly rearrested Lippman, and prevailed upon the janitor to make a charge of unlawfully entering a building. Thereupon Magistrate Mott held him in $300 bail for trial. This is probably the first legal recognition of the fact that paying one’s way into a theatre is a method of housebreaking.