What do you do if you see a red-faced and hatless man running toward you, hoarsely bellowing,

Murder!

If he waves his arms at something behind you and roars out,

Stop that man! Murder!

And if he continues to wave, to pant and to perspire, as he rushes past you, if he continues to yell for

someone to stop that man or stop that car or carriage, what, as I asked before, do you do?

You look over your shoulder, and there certainly are a number of men as well as cars or carriages.

Some of them are hurrying.

If you are a prompt and bold sort of person, quick to believe anything you hear and eager for

excitement, you start to run and to shout and perhaps you catch and collar the hurrying man.

And he turns out to be a gas inspector. You look around for the original shouter and find that

he has gone away, chuckling over the success of his joke. Or it may be that you're nearly run over

by a car in which there are two men with a motion picture camera. One of them calls out to you,

Get out of the way, fella! Don't you see? We're taking pictures.

You realize that you have at last got into the movies, but we'll not get any glory out of it, only abuse.

So probably, being of a doubting cast of mine, you do not join the red-faced man who is screaming about murder.

You draw aside as he runs by and say,

What's all the shouting for?

And thus, perhaps, you miss undying fame.

Someone else gets his name in the papers and pockets a reward.

Two or three policemen once made exactly this mistake. They looked at the shouting man and remarked,

You're crazy. Then they went on directing traffic or walking their beats, or whatever they were doing,

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