第44章 CHAPTER IX.(5)

I said. I asked her to tell Mr. Duminel, my lawyer, to come to my cell. I told him of it, and he said he would call the commissioners together and would have them let me out by paying my fines by monthly installments. This he did. So Mr. Furlong sent the money needed and Dr. Harding and Mrs. Goodwin collected seventy dollars from my friends to help me out. When I got to Kansas City, I lacked fifty cents of having enough money to pay for my ticket east, so I borrowed that of the man at the fruit stand in the depot. In about a week from that I spoke at Atlantic City for the Philadelphia American, the proceeds being used to give the poor children an outing. Thousands of people were present.

I never made a note or wrote a sentence for the platform in my life.

Have spoken extemporaneously from the first and often went on the platform when I could not have told what I was to say to save my life, and for several weeks God compelled me to open my Bible at random and speak from what my eyes fell on. I have literally proved that: "You shall not think of what you shall speak but it shall be given in that hour." The best thoughts have come to me after being asleep, waking in the night or in the morning.

The way I happened to think of a hatchet as a souvenir, some one brought me one and told me I ought to carry them. I then selected a pattern and got a party in Providence, R. I., to make them. These have been a great financial aid to me; helped me pay my fines and expenses.

People have often bought them from me, at my prison cell window. I sell them everywhere I go.

The summer of 1902 I was at Coney Island, speaking in Steeple-

Chase Park, and a man was very insulting to me, and always took occasion to say something against women. I can scarcely remember how it was, but I broke or smashed his show case of cigars and cigarettes. I knew I would have to pay for it, but I did not mind paying for the object lesson that it would be, for tobacco is a poison, and the use of it is a vice.

I was arrested, stood my trial and was being sent to jail, when Mr.

Tilyou, Manager of Steeple-Chase Park, took me from the "Black Maria."

The policeman who had the prisoners in charge was purple and bloated from beer drinking, he wanted me to go in a place in the front that was already crowded with women. I refused and he struck me on the hand that was holding to the iron bars of the little window and broke a bone, causing it to swell up. I said: "Never mind, you beer-swelled, whiskey- soaked saturn faced man, God will strike you." In six weeks from that time this man fell dead on the streets of Coney Island. This was the first time I every had handcuffs on. I saw in this experience in Police Courts in Coney Island what I never saw before, eight or ten women sentenced for drunkenness; one the mother of five children, and the others nice looking young ladies, and most of them were weeping. When they received their sentences there would be a smothered laugh from the audience of bloated men present, and I turned and said: "Shame on you, for laughing at the sorrows of these poor women." I thought how heartless it was for men to laugh at the disgrace of women. I got out by paying for the destruction of the cigar case.

I was very successful and made enough money to pay $125 a month to have my SMASHER'S MAIL published in the form of a magazine, but having no one in Topeka that could edit the magazine, doing justice to me, I returned and closed the business.