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Show At)aun1 "&he "Red Onion." B There is in Zion town a fount the "Onion Red," B From which highway men like Autumnal leaves fl are shed. B Where most do congregate dull-eyed and raucous B pugs, B Deft safe manipulators, highway knaves, black B thugs, B In sooth a murd'rous throng. They babbling In the B night, B Gin-bibbers, flaunt espionage of law, and blight B The dawn with ribald song; until proud Phoebus B shoots B His primal shaft, when muttering curses, sodden B eyed galoots B Arise from couches adamantine on the floor H And quaffiing pois'nous draughts, Red Onioned, B shriek for more. I The most malodorous of the Shanghai dives B which disfigure our port towns is scarcely a more B disreputable rendezvous for the lawless than the B Red Onion, which a few days ago came under B special policemanic notice through a murderous assault. It is remarkable that a dive harboring such a motley gang of depraved wretches and vagrant criminals could so long have escaped the notice of municipal officers. If the Eight Immaculates of the late council, instead of wasting their time n inane and petty dissension and in posing as ' oearded archangels of purity, had investigated the question of giving licenses to keepers of dens of crime, the municipality would have been benefited bene-fited thereby, and the Red Onion would long ago have been obliterated from the list of II censed gin-reservoirs. If Villon and his company of renowned Pari sian porch-climbers had happened to walk into this carnival of orgies on some night when the ragged pickpockets and plunderers were peculiarly peculiar-ly rampant, they would have fled the streets, with their hands clutching the wallets holding their ill-gotten Louis D'Or. About midnight the gin begins to hurtle through the veinous architecture of the human vultures which infest this place and there ensues a tumult of harsh baritones mingled with the resonant klink of the gin glassware and interrupted inter-rupted occasionally by a voluble thud as the Impact Im-pact of a Herculean fist collides with the frontis piece of a reveler who has ceased to be popular with one of his fellow rogues. , When the flery hiatus of the gin subsides Into vapors of stupor, the denizens of the Red Onion sprawl on the floor, and the shouts of the valiant crew who are still capable of destroying a robust drink are merged in the stentorian breathing ol the fallen. Occasionally there reaches the ears of the bibulous horde the clink of chips or the whirr of the marble of fortune from the gambling den above, where the plunder of some of the habitues is being hazarded. It' is in such places as the Red Onion that plots originate which result in the assault upon pedestrians, in bold acts of highway robbery and the plundering of business houses and homes. The license of the Red Onion should he revoked. re-voked. It should have been revoked long ago. I' political safeguards have been responsible fcr the uninterrupted conduct of such disreputably places, the public should be made aware of l through a councllmanic investigation. The action of Mr. A. J. Davis in having he mayor's com munication, revoking the license of the proprietors, proprie-tors, referred to a committee was totally unneces sary, as the councilman knows or should knff The doors of the Red Onion and other places of like disrepute should be summarily closed. |