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.
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