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Show St. Louis vs. Detroit. <br><br> One wouldn't think there was such a difference between the people of St. Louis and Detroit in the matter of committing suicide. In St. Louis, when a young woman has made up her mind that life is a burden too heavy to be longer borne she sits down and writes a dying lament to three different daily papers. Then she writes a letter to the coroner and tells him to buy a $200 lot to bury her body in, erect a $500 stone in her memory, and to select a jury of poets and clergymen to view her remains. Then she dresses in her best and starts for the river. It is always a wild night. She always reaches a wharf-boat without being seen. Her wild, despairing cry as she leaps into the murky river always floats to heaven on the shrieking gale, and when her body is found a smile of angelic sweetness is playing around her mouth. <br><br> How different such things are in Detroit! The young woman writes no poetry, and has no thought of the coroner. She cares not for a burial lot centrally situated, or a monument with a cherub to crown it. They never go out to commit suicide on a wild night, as it might spoil their clothes. Some one always sees them as they go down to the river. They never say anything but "Oh!" when they jump. There are always a dozen men on hand to pull them out, wring them dry, furnish them with a glass of cheap lager, and send them home with the warning: <br><br> "Now, gal, if you come fooling around with our drinking water any more we'll have you sent up for six months!" <br><br> There isn't any romance here in Detroit. Everything is a cold, stern reality, and our greatest poets and sentimentalists give their personal attention to buying the family cabbages.-[Detroit Free Press. |