(2 of 2)
The woman in the automobile screamed. The salesman caught his hat in his hand and sprang back into the shelter of the doorway. Two things had fallen out of Mrs. Barren's window. The first was the garden box. The second was Mrs. Barron.
The body fell the first six stories like a plummet; struck the guy-wire of the flagpole and turned over, almost languidly, in the sunlit air; fell three stories more, through the wire mesh, through the glass; careered from an iron beam of the marquee, struck the pavement— plop. The guy-wire was broken. The iron beam was badly bent. The woman in the automobile fainted.
Later in the day a hospital reported on Mrs. Barron:
"She has not lost consciousness. No bones are broken. There is no evidence of internal injuries." Observers collected pieces of the garden-box as souvenirs.
Scooter
In San Francisco, at the intersection of Vienna St. and Russia Ave., one John Sambrailo, aged six, vigorously propelling himself upon a "scooter," collided violently last week with one John Silvio, an obfuscated, pot-valiant carpenter.
Carpenter Silvio, incensed, drew a large jackknife with his right hand and opened it with his teeth, while with his left hand he seized John Sambrailo. The child screamed with pain and rage as the man gripped his hand and carved lightly on his palm with the jackknife an admonitory cross. Scooter John's parents pronounced the wound superficial; declared that they will not seek legal retribution.
Lesson
For a decade the local gendarme at Saint Plouer, a Breton village, has passed regularly on patrol the cottage, dung hill and barn of one M. Letort, strapping farmer, and his toothless shrewish wife.
Last week as the gendarme made his rounds, he chanced to step within the Letort barn to escape for a few moments a cold and biting rain. A strangled cry drew his attention to a close barred door. Curious, he unbarred it, discovered a foul smelling stall, four feet square, perhaps four and a half feet high. On the slimy floor lay a girl, raving, naked, paralyzed from the waist down. A gasoline tin hacked in half and filled with scraps of food stood beside a "bed" made of decaying straw. The chill wind blew full upon the girl through numerous cracks.
Interrogated by the gendarme, Mme. Letort said: "The girl was our daughter Celine. She brought shame upon us—with a soldier—eight years ago. We locked her up to teach her a lesson, because she was bad tempered and weak minded. My husband fed her regularly and she got sufficient exercise walking on her hands and knees until her legs became paralyzed two years ago. She never caught cold in spite of her clothes wearing out. My son thought we were too hard on her, and so he gave Celine fresh straw for a bed now and then. To me she is as one dead." Celine, swiftly conveyed to a hospital, last week continued to rave dementedly.
*About 150 feet from sidewalk.
†Mrs. Eleanor Batik of Charlotte.
**W. W. Norman of Mooresville.