The Pendleton case is one of the most interesting in the New York books. In the Supreme Court the contrary view was held, but on appeal, the Court of Errors reversed this by a divided court. Two sena tors delivered written opinions in favor of reversal, and the chancellor was of the same mind, and two senators wrote in support of the judgment below. On the vote six were for affirmance and sixteen were for reversal. Some of the senators uttered high moral precepts, one of them observing: "If in the long track of ages which are past I could find no case parallel with the present, I should decide against the plaintiff, satisfied that if the same case had ever existed, the principal actor in it had not aspired to immortality by publishing his own infamy. But the constructive eviction must proceed from the conduct of the landlord himself, as in the Pendleton case. If he simply lets one part to tenants who thus create a nuisance, and does not connive at or consent to such occupation, there is no eviction." DeWill v. Pierson, 112 Mass. 8; 17 Am. Rep. 58 : Gilhooley v. Wash ington, 4 N. Y. 217 (the last being covenant on a sealed lease), "which does not depend on the fact of occupancy or enjoyment." In the Massachusetts case, the Pendleton case was pronounced " an extreme case," " modified if not overruled," and the Supreme Court of New York, in Etheridge v. Osborn, 12 Wend. 529, said it " carried the doctrine of eviction to its utmost verge." This was the opinion of Sav age, C. J. of the court in both cases. In the Gilhooky case, the Court of Appeals, Bronson, J., said it was a case where " the landlord himself drove the tenant out of his part of the house by bringing a moral pestilence into another part of the building." One judge dissented, and would not distinguish the Pendleton case. An amusing evidence of the hostility of the old lawyers to the " reformed procedure " then recently introduced in New York is found in the opening sen tence of the opinion of Bronson, J. : " If it be not unlawful to speak of things by their old names, this is an action of covenant on a lease, etc. How those old judges did kick! Bronson could not bring himself to say, "This is. an action to recover rent on a lease." That would, to his conscience, have been an " uncovenanted mercy" to the code. But we have outlived all that lingo. "Curfew shall not R1ng To-n1ght." — So say in effect the Texas supreme court in Ex parte MeCarver, holding that an ordinance making it a misdemeanor for a person under twenty-one years of age to be on the public street of any city or town after nine o'clock at night is an unreasonable exer cise of the general powers of the municipality to pre serve the public peace and protect the good order and morality of the community, and therefore void. The ordinance provided for the ringing of a " curfew bell " at that hour. The only exceptions were where the minor was accompanied by his parent or guardian, or was in search of a physician . The court conjured up a number of other reasonable exceptions, observing : — "He may be at church or at some social gathering in the town, and yet, when the curfew bell tolls, in the midst of a sermon or exhortation, he would be compelled to leave and hie himself to his home, or if at a sociable gath ering, he must make his exit in haste. He could not be sent by his parents to a drug store, or, for that matter, on any errand, save and except for a physician. The rule laid down here is as rigid as under military law, and makes the tolling of the curfew bell equivalent to the drum taps of the camp. In our opinion, it is an undue invasion of the personal liberty of the citizen, as the boy or girl (for it equally applies to both) have the same rights of ingress and egress that citizens of mature years enjoy. We regard this character of legislation as an attempt to usurp the parental functions, and as unreasonable, and we therefore hold the ordinance in question as illegal and void. See City of St. Louis v. Fitz, 53 Mo. 582; City of Chicago v. Trotter (Ill. Sup.), 26 N. E. Rep. 359." The legislators could not have had a distinct idea of the meaning of "curfew" — derived, as every lawyer ought to know, from the French eouvre fen, cover fire — an injunction to orderly people to cover their fires for the night, and get under the bed clothes. Fire, down in Texas, has only one mean ing — to shoot. Fall of Dress Form. — A very singular case is Cavanagh v . O'Neil, N. Y. App. Div. 4; Am. Neg. Rep. 527. A saleslady was employed behind a storecounter, two feet two inches from a showcase six and a half feet high, on top of which was a row of dressforms or busts, about three feet high, with no rail in front, and not secured in any way from falling. The iron rod supporting one of these was bent, and by the shock of moving furniture overhead or by a draft from a window opened behind, it was toppled over, and struck and injured the plaintiff. A nonsuit was set aside. The plaintiff came off more luckily than Mrs. or Miss Kendall in her suit against the city of Boston (118 Mass. 234), who was injured by the fall of Ben Franklin's bust from the railing of a bal cony in a hall, on the occasion of a public reception given by the city to the Grand Duke Alexis.
Prox1mate Bears. — The most subtle and meta physical question now discussed in courts of law is that of proximate and remote cause of damages. A very interesting decision on this question was made in the Massachusetts Supreme Court last summer, in Stone
