Everything's a
crime."
"Sure thing," agreed the captain. "I never yet had any trouble finding a
crime to charge a man with, once I got the nippers on him."
"That's so," interjected the plain-clothes man. "Did you ever know it
was a crime to mismanage a steam boiler? Well, it is."
"Quite right," agreed Mr. Magnus, the indictment clerk. "The great
difficulty for the perfectly honest man nowadays is to avoid some act or
omission which the legislature has seen fit to make a crime without his
knowledge. Refilling a Sarsaparilla bottle, for instance, or getting up
a masquerade ball or going fishing or playing on Sunday or loitering
about a building to overhear what people are talking about inside--"
"That's no crime," protested the captain scornfully.
"Yes, it is too!" retorted Mr. Magnus, otherwise known to his fellows as
Caput, because of his supposed cerebral inflation. "Just like it is a
crime to have any kind of a show or procession on Sunday except a
funeral, in which case it's a crime to make a disbursing noise at it."
"What's a disbursing noise?" demanded O'Brien.
"I don't know," admitted Magnus. "But that's the law anyway. You can't
make a disbursing noise at a funeral on Sunday."
"Oh, hell!" ejaculated the captain. "Come to think of it, it's a crime
to spit. What man is safe?"
"It occurs to me," continued Mr. Magnus thoughtfully, "that it is a
crime under the law to build a house on another man's land; now I should
say that there was a close analogy between doing that and sleeping in
his bed.
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