He Harrington was an unromantic man. was the last person in the world to be suspected of doing any thing because of sentiment. Shortly before his disappearance he had met with severe pecuniary losses, and was generally considered to have been "done for" as to pocket, but his most intimate associates never discovered that he had become desperate in consequence. He was a little low-spirited at times, but never dropped a word to lead to the belief that his fortunes were irretrievable, or that it was out of his power to continue his life of insouciance for any number of years. is of He The more recent case of Henry Ya different type. Ten years since he was a young merchant of New York, doing a prosperous business, and, to all appearance, on the high road to fortune. In his home he was equally blessed, and with a beautiful, amiable wife and three lovely children, established in a luxuriously furnished house, his lines seemed cast in most pleasant places. Suddenly the wife sickened and died, and Y, who was of a nervous temperament, was completely unstrung by the event, and his very nature changed. neglected his business and his children equally, One evening, some four years ago, he was and was a mere automaton, performing the andrinking with a party of friends in the Hone imal functions of life without any intellectual House in Broadway. He was in his usual volition. A few mornings after the burial of spirits, chatted in his usual way on bar-room his wife he kissed his children mechanically, topics, and did not give the slightest evidence and saying he was going to the store, passed of mental depression or aberration. Remark-out of the house. He never was seen again. ing that it was time to go home, and bidding his friends good-night, he passed out the door into the street alone. From that moment he has never been seen by any person who ever knew him. He did not go home, but where he went or what befell him was never known. The most diligent inquiry upon the part of his friends, aided by official search, failed to obtain the slightest clew to his fate. Whether he is dead or alive, or, if the former, whether he was murdered or committed suicide, is equally unknown. He stepped, in an instant, from the glare and glitter of a drinking-saloon into the realms of unfathomable mystery, and love and curiosity have been alike powerless to follow him. It It was supposed that in a fit of mental anguish he had committed suicide; but, for all his friends know, he may have wandered away and been picked up in some far-off State, where even yet he may be lingering out a horrible vacuity in a lunatic asylum. One of the most remarkable of the many cases on record is that of E. R. C- -n, agent of the Adams Express Company in an Eastern city, which made a great sensation at the time of the occurrence. He was a man of fine business capacity and regular habits, and enjoyed the full confidence of the great corporation in whose employ he had been for many years. In his domestic relations there was nothing amiss, and he was a thorough home man. He was not addicted to dissipation of any kind, and was hence an entire stranger to the fastness of these times. Rather unsocial in his nature, he never picked up chance acquaintances to lead difficulties. His experiences were all of the eminently respectable class; but he had been sufficiently long in a position to know the guiles of the world, and being a strong-minded, passionless man, there was no one better able to take care of himself under all possible circumstances. An equally singular and more ancient case is that of Joseph J. Smith, a paper-hanger. It is now many years since he was employed to paper a house on Murray Hill, in New York. He was a poor man, absorbed in his daily toil, and ut-him astray, and he was never known to get into terly unaware that life had in it any thing beyond the endless struggle for the necessaries to sustain it. On the day in question he worked steadily all day, and at the usual hour in the evening started to go home. He left the implements of his trade and his stock of paper in the house, with which to resume his work on the ensuing morning, and gave a promise that he Friday, December 20, 1867, he left the house would complete the job as soon as possible. of a friend in Fifth Street, New York, to go so happened that he met so many acquaintances to the New Haven dépôt, where he had made that his homeward route was subsequently ac- an appointment to meet a friend who was curately traced until he was crossing the Elysian to accompany him on his homeward journey. Fields and nearing his suburban home beyond He was watched from the house he had left Hoboken. There he disappeared as completely until he turned into Third Avenue out of as though the ground had opened and swallowed Fifth Street. In making that turn he passed him, for no trace of him was ever afterward dis-out of human knowledge. The friend at the covered. Surmise even was at fault. He was dépôt waited impatiently, and finally lost the a sober man, and had not, therefore, fallen into train. the river and been drowned. He was a poor man, and the thieves, who are generally well posted on the pecuniary resources of their victims, had not made way with him. He was ways. happy in his home relations, and it was not likely that he had voluntarily deserted them. He had disappeared, and that was all there was of it. C- -n was the most punctual of men, and the friend proceeded at once to ascertain the cause of this first lapse from his accustomed That friend has never succeeded in the task assumed with a belief that a few moments would suffice for its accomplishment. As soon as it became certain that he had disappeared steps were taken to discover the cause. With the usual human charity it was surmised |ing, and that is something worth waiting forty at once that he was a defaulter and had ab- years for. sconded. His accounts were therefore submitThe cases of persons who have darted out ted to a most rigid examination, only to prove of the home circle and been mourned as dead, that he had been scrupulously honest and exact but have subsequently reappeared, are very nuin all his monetary dealings. The Express Com-merous, and some that I have garnered are of pany began then to value the missing treasure, a very startling character. I venture to give and offered a reward of $1000 for information the first of these only after having obtained inof his whereabouts or fate. This prospective dubitable proofs of its truth. prize naturally had a stimulating effect, and the search for the missing one became active and exhaustive throughout the country, but especially so in New York. The city was thoroughly ransacked by expert detectives as familiar with it as is a school-boy with the inkstains of his desk.. The cards issued by the Express Company, bearing a photograph of the lost agent and a minute description of his person and clothing, were scattered all over the Union and sent to the police authorities of England and the Continent. Probably no man was ever searched for with more rapacity, and no search was ever less productive. No clew to the missing agent was ever obtained. In the glare of noonday, and in one of the most crowded thoroughfares of a great city, he had been resolved, as it were, into an impalpability, and had left not a trace of his existence any where on earth. After a time the search for him flagged, and was finally abandoned a few weeks since by the withdrawal of the reward by the Company. His case has been laid away in the memories of detectives as one of their many queer experiences. The case of Chancellor Lansing is now preserved only in the traditions of a generation that in a few years will be unrepresented among men. It is full forty years since he left a New York hotel one afternoon to take the Albany boat for his home. He left carrying a small carpet-bag; and the porter who handed it to him at the door was long remembered as the last person who had seen him, knowing who he was. He never reached the boat, for he was perfectly well known to all of its officers; but notwithstanding the most strenuous efforts, no knowledge of his fate was ever obtained. He was a man full of years and honors, and of great wealth and high official and social position. There was nothing in his character, temperament, or antecedents to warrant the belief that he had been guilty of self-destruction, or had unwittingly fallen a victim to metropolitan snares. His place on earth had been made vacant, but there is not, and can never be, any record of how, or when, or where. He may have died that day; he may have lived for years afterward. He may have become food for the fishes of Hudson River; he may have been buried under the sands of Sahara. The lapse of time since his disappearance has only brought to his descendants the consoling knowledge that he is dead. If they have been robbed of the priceless memory of having watched over his last hours, they are no longer haunted by a sense of the miseries of carth he may be endur Many years ago a family named W- -g was settled in one of the upper counties of New Jersey. The father and mother were then nearing middle life, and the eldest of the four sons was verging upon manhood. One day this son suddenly disappeared, but his absence did not for some days create any uneasiness, for it was supposed that he had gone to New York, and would soon return. After a time, however, his continued absence caused anxiety, and a search was begun. The neighborhood was thoroughly scoured, but it ended without result. The police authorities of New York were applied to, and made some exertion in the matter, but finally reported that no trace of him, dead or alive, could be found any where in the city. Years passed on, and he was at last given up as dead. The father and mother were put away in the church-yard, and one of the sons succeeded them in the old homestead. He too married, and his children grew up around him. At last, after the lapse of twenty-five years from the date of the disappearance of his elder brother, this Jersey farmer had occasion to visit the wild pine region of his county. While there he happened to fall in with a farmer bearing his own name of Wg. This coincidence led to inquiries, and the younger Wg was much astonished to find in the man before him that elder brother who had disappeared twentyfive years before, and who during all that time had lived within forty miles of the old homestead. It appeared from his explanations that the elder W- -g had merely wandered away in the first instance from a youthful impulse, and chance, rather thân purpose, directing his course, had reached the pine region of his own county. There he met a farm-girl of whom he became enamored, and engaging himself as a laborer with her father, he finally married her. Up to the time of his marriage he had always intended to return home at an early day, and had not, therefore, sent any news of himself to his parents; and after his marriage he became so engrossed in his new ties and duties that the remembrance of his boyhood associations gradually faded from his mind. In due course of time his father-in-law died, and he had succeeded to the farm, which he managed so well that when the brothers met he had become the richest man of his section. During all of these years the brothers had lived continuously in the same county within forty miles of each other, and the younger in the firm belief that his elder brother was dead. There must have been but little intercommunication in those days in New Jersey, and the State may, after all, be all the better for the | 5 o'clock, G―t Fs left the store of his Camden and Amboy. In these times of rest- son in Seventh Avenue near Thirty-fifth Street lessness and fast trains this incident could not to go to the residence of his daughter in Fortybe repeated even in New Jersey. seventh Street. He did not go there, nor did a Very often these sudden flights from home thorough search the next day of all the hospiend at last in personal ruin, as was the case tals and police stations give any information of with Charles A-r. His father had been his fate. He was a man about sixty-five years wealthy, but was suddenly reduced in circum- of age, with gray hair and whiskers, and a large, stances, and being shortly afterward made help- fresh face. He was of noticeable appearance less by paralysis, the family had a hard strug- any where, and trace was lost of him in a neighgle for life. In this emergency Charles, then borhood where he had resided for the years of a boy of fifteen years, seemed made of hero- a generation, and where he was well known to ic stuff. Obtaining work as clerk in a shoe a large portion of the inhabitants. He was a store, he served his employer faithfully. At man of most temperate and regular habits, and home he was the strong right arm of the fam- was still engaged in the business of cattle-broker,. ily. Robbing himself of the sleep so necessary at which he had amassed a competence. On at his age, he labored before going to his work the day of his disappearance he had been enat the store, and after his return at night, in gaged in his routine duties, and it was subsethe menial home duties, in order to lighten his quently ascertained that he did not have any mother's tasks. He always brought to her his very great amount of money about him. Perpittance of a salary intact, never reserving even fectly sober, and in the possession of all his a penny for himself. No boy was ever a great-powers, mental and physical, this plain, matterer blessing to his parents; none ever better ful-of-fact old man, who never did any thing rofilled the obligations of filial love. One night he did not return from the store. The next day passing without his appearance, dismay came upon the bereaved parents. Making such inquiries as they could, they found that he had left the store as usual, but they could trace him no farther. They had such absolute faith in him that they never harbored the thought that he had thus left them without a word of warning, and they therefore settled at once into the belief that he had in some way been overtaken by death. The blow was a severe one, and the father, who had partially recovered, and had become in some measure self-helpful before the loss of his son, then struggled on alone. Some two years after the disappearance the father was taken by the business of his employers to Louisville, Kentucky, and there unfortunately encountered his lost boy. Charles had become a maudlin drunkard, an incorrigible loafer, and an associate of thieves and harlots. He had, after all, become suddenly weary of his noble part, and determined to rid himself of the burden. He had wandered away under this impulse, and had worked his way through the country until he reached the Ohio River, where he embarked as a pantry-boy on a steamboat. The gradations of his after-life were easy, and he had run down hill as naturally as the river he traveled. He manifested no emotion of any kind when he met his father, and flatly refused to return home, or to make any promise of reform. Thenceforward the black day in that family was the anniversary of that, on which the lost was found. mantic in his life, was thus suddenly lost. The vacuum he left will never be accounted for, unless a time shall come when some trace of him is discovered. These cases might be multiplied to any desired extent, but the one given is sufficient for my purpose, as it is, in the leading features, a sample of the others. The statistics upon this subject are not, as yet, very voluminous, for the reason that it was not until quite recently that the Police Commissioners began to make any permanent record of the applications made for aid in searching for missing persons. The last quarterly report of the Inspectors, who are in charge of all detective business, shows that during the quarter 258 applications were made. Of these missing persons 151 were recovered, and 73 returned voluntarily, leaving 34 still unaccounted for. At the date of the previous report there were 24 still unfound, but 11 of these were subsequently recovered, leaving 13 to be added to the 34 of the last report, and making a total of 47 vacuums. These figures do not include the very large number of persons who are continually disappearing in the city, but who are found again within a day or two. These absences are generally due remotely to whisky, and primarily to confinement in a police prison for drunkenness, or in one of the hospitals from a bodily injury received while drunk. Saturday night is the time when these temporary vacuums usually occur, and the Inspector on duty Sunday morning at the Central Police-office is kept busy for hours by a constant succession of inquirers for those who failed to return home on the previous night. These anxious people also repair to the police courts, which are in session on Sundays until noon, with the hope of there finding the missing ones arraigned before the magistrates for intoxication, or some petty violation of the Tuesday evening, November 20, 1868, about law.. Very generally, at one place or the other, There are numerous cases of disappearances on record that are of such recent date that it is too soon, as yet, to class them as permanent. Some of these, however, are interesting as showing how suddenly and completely a man may be lost in a great city. they are successful in their search, and it not unfrequently happens that they gain very little by it. One of the most pathetic sights I ever encountered was on a late Sabbath morning, when a poor, laboring Irishman, carrying a puling, emaciated infant of three months, presented himself at one of the courts in search of his wife. The man had a haggard, unkempt appearance that was full proof of his story, that on the previous evening he had returned home hungry and tired, and found that his wife had gone away, leaving the child alone, and without having prepared his supper. All night long he had paced the floor with the hungry, wailing babe, and in the morning started out, weary and heart-sore, to search for the truant wife. He found her in the prison, where she had lain overnight, after having been picked up in the street in a state of maudlin intoxication. She was scarcely sober when he took her home, and it was impossible to believe that the poor fellow was much the gainer by the recovery of such a wife. These Sunday morning inquirers are very often completely baffled, and kept on the rack of anxiety for many additional hours, by the stupidity or false pride of the persons for whom they are searching. If Jones, being in a respectable station in life, happens to be a little the worse for liquor, and is picked up by a policeman, when arraigned before the sergeant at the station-house he is very apt, from a desire to keep the knowledge of his adventure from his friends, to give a fictitious name. If he is taken when a great deal the worse for liquor, Jones can only stare about him in hopeless imbecility, and often does not recover his faculties the next day until after he has been taken to court, and been committed by the magistrate as John Doe. In either case it is apparent that all clew to Jones is lost. His friends may be as persistent as possible without finding any trace of him, unless it should happen to occur to them that it would be a good thing to visit the thirty station-houses and four prisons of the city, and make a personal inspection of all the inmates, provided they can obtain permission to do so. As this will be difficult to get, and the operation will, besides, be one requiring much time and some trouble, it will be better for Jones not to get drunk. If he must, then let him give his own proper name to the authorities, or, if he intends to become fuddled beyond his power to do so, let him beforehand label himself with a card in his pocket. He may thus save his friends much anxiety, and give himself the pleasure of disappointing the birds of prey who roost about the New York prisons, ready to become carrier-pigeons for any prisoner fortunate enough to have one dollar to be paid in advance for the service. When the vacuum in the family has existed for several days—if nothing can be said to exist -and the proper material for filling it can not be found in any of the hospitals or prisons, the searchers become feverishly anxious, and the authorities begin to have a semblance of concern about the matter. In every case of disappearance the relatives imagine the worst, and for the time the whole business of their lives is comprehended in the search for the missing. They flit in and out of the Central Police-office every day, and the patient and sympathetic official who has charge of the Missing Bureau is seldom, during business hours, without some of the grief-stricken at his side. They crave to know surely, even though it be to know the worst, and the thirst for this certainty soon becomes as that of him being scorched with a fever for a plunge in the cool waters that seem, in his delirium, to lap his couch with a pleasant, babbling sound. It is in vain to tell these people of the many cases within official experience where the missing have come back in a week or a month safe and whole, and with valid excuses for the absence. The searchers are ready to admit that this might be true of others, but in their cases they are sure something has happened, and, unless the officers can bring back the estrays at once, they insist on murder at least having been done. The chances are only as one in a thousand that murder has been done, and only as one in one hundred that the missing person has met death by accident or suicide, and there is, therefore, abundant room for hope that he is alive. He may be sick, or destitute, or driveling in some lunatic asylum; but there is almost a surety of life, and no occasion for despair. It is proverbial that relatives can never assign any reason for a voluntary disappearance, but the keen detective instinct rarely fails to find one. So successful, indeed, have the authorities been in this respect that they are able to state the causes of these constantly recurring vacuums as few in number, and generally commonplace. This earth has a broad surface, and it is within the power of any one to straggle off into one of its by-ways, out of the ken of his people, and hundreds do it for the same reason. Young girls are sped by their passions into the abysses of sin; boys are led away by the unbridled love of adventure, or snap the reins of parental authority when injudiciously tightened; husbands flee from hen-peckery, and wives desert bearish husbands; men are called suddenly away by business, and persons wander off under the guidance of unsuspected and suddenly developed insanity; some seek to leave a grief too heavy to bear, and others basely skulk from responsibilities and embarrassments. All, without exception, act from impulse, even when, as sometimes happens, they are led astray by designing knaves to be plundered and left helpless far distant from their homes. It is undoubtedly true that a missing person is always described to have been a most sensible man, with no romance or sentiment about him; but it is hard to resist the belief that there is a screw loose some where in the mental machinery of those who | spector's card-rack, form a gallery of pictures as thus slip out of the home circles, and leave interesting as the huge volumes of photographs friends to a wearying anxiety that a single of thieves which lie upon his table. line from them would relieve. But the meagre statistics given show how small a proportion return voluntarily, and how many must be searched for. That this search is so frequently successful is owing rather to accident and good luck than to thoroughness. If any searcher for the lost imagines that a detective is dispatched to scour the country on his particular business, let him remember that policeofficers must live like other mortals, and dismiss the idea. Detectives very frequently make long journeys in pursuit of thieves; but the expense is always paid by the despoiled parties, and a handsome reward besides. On the other hand, the great majority of missing persons seem to be comparatively valueless, in a monetary view, and $100 is the highest average reward that is offered for information concerning them. One is a man in middle life, with a curlyheaded little girl standing by his side. He has an expression somewhat stern about the mouth, but drifting off at the eyes to a tinge of sadness. The child is open-browed, and dimpled with merriment; no trace there of the cares that have furrowed the father's forehead with sharp, deep lines. They are a striking couple, each individually, and in contrast; and it is a marvel how they have managed for all the months that have elapsed since their disappearance to escape keen-eyed policemen and loving friends. Next to them is a young man with great masses of curling hair piled above his lofty brow. The glasses worn when the picture was taken have blurred the eyes, but have not changed the sedate, scholarly expression of the face. That young man must have wandered from his college in a fit of studious abstraction, for there is none of the fastness of youth about him. He must have been abstemious, and has certainly not had the experience of Jones just referred to. It would be love's labor lost to search for him in police prisons; but he might be found in some hospital, the victim of some hurt received in warding injury from a fellow, or, perhaps, himself whole, ministering to the maimed and suffering in the wards. He might The search for missing persons, then, is detective business only in name; but the Police Commissioners have done what they could to aid the bereaved. They have selected a most capable listener to sit at a desk and listen patiently to all the searchers have to say, and take voluminous and useless notes of their talk. This, to be sure, does not amount to much practically, except as a satisfaction to the talkers. But the police rules go further. If the friends are willing to meet the expense, a new card ap-have been, but he never was, so far as the recpears, and it is like this: OFFICE OF THE SUPT. OF THE METROPOLITAN POLICE, CHARLES CN left Albany on Tuesday, November 19, at 8 P.M., supposed to have come to New York. He is 17 years of age, 5 feet 9 inches in height, blue eyes, light hair, slim built, has a small mole or wart on his chin. Was dressed in a brown cloth business suit, with black water-proof over-coat, having an extra long cape, and gray cap; prepossessing in appearance, and courteous in his manners. If found, to be brought to this office, or any information of him to be sent to In spector Dilks. ords show. As yet he has been undiscovered, devil boy of fifteen years. One of these is added to the many that already embellish the card-rack hanging against the wall of the Inspector's office, and the others are sent all over the city and country. Every police station is in a few days provided with a copy, and the information that a new recruit has been added to the shadowy army of the missing has been very generally diffused. These cards have been found very efficacious, and nearly all the recoveries officially effected are attributable to them, but nevertheless belong almost exclusively to the chapter of accidents. The policeman in New York or some other city At the very top of the rack is the picture of casually encounters the described person, and, a remarkable face. It is very thin and anprovided he does not forget all about the mat-gular, and scarred all over with a hard lifeter, mentions it to his chief, who transmits the struggle. That man had lost his faith in men, information to the designated point. This is the whole of police intervention; but it is quite as much as people have shown a willingness to pay for. Some of the cards bear a photograph of the missing person, and these, ranged upon the In and had doubtless wandered away in quest of something better than humanity. It was not the sadness of penury he had, but the more smiting one of a mistrust that was of slow growth and deep root. He had tried hard to think well of his race, but one event after an |