Average Jones is a collection of linked detective stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams, published in the early twentieth century and set in contemporary New York City. Its eleven chapters follow the cases of Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones—”Average” for his initials—a wealthy young idler who sets himself up as an “Ad-Visor,” tracing the human stories hidden in the classified advertisements of the daily papers. Each chapter is a self-contained mystery, though the same small circle of friends and settings recurs throughout.
“You have one rare faculty, Jones. You can, when you choose, sharpen the pencil of your mind to a very fine point.”
The premise is established in the first chapter, at the Cosmic Club. Jones, twenty-seven, has an income of twenty-five thousand a year and expectations of some ten millions, but the money comes with a posthumous jeer: his late uncle’s will requires five years of continuous residence in New York, after which the city’s “virus” is expected to have worked through him and he will squander the fortune in a “poisoned shower” upon the metropolis his uncle despoiled. Jones has no taste for dissipation. What he wants is action, and the newspaper owner Waldemar supplies the idea—that nobody has yet made a study of queer advertisements. The clubman Bertram calls this the wail of the unslaked romanticist, and he is not wrong: Jones is waiting for the Adventure of Life to creep up behind him. The advertisement is the lariat it tosses over his shoulders.
From the B-Flat Trombone to the Million-Dollar Dog
The Wager at the Cosmic Club
The book opens at the Cosmic Club, where three men are discussing “What’s the matter with Jones?” Waldemar, the oldest, owns and sometimes operates an important newspaper and wears a heavy face of good-humored power; Robert Bertram is the slender, languidly elegant club idler; the third is Jones himself, whose nickname derives from his initials, A. V. R. E., preceding J for Jones. He looks like a composite photograph of well-conditioned Americans aged twenty-five to thirty, relieved by large, deep-set, thoughtful eyes. At twenty-seven he reviews his five years since college and four undergraduate years, wondering why he never justified his favorite professor’s parting words: that he has one rare faculty—when he chooses, he can sharpen the pencil of his mind to a very fine point—and should specialize. He has twenty-five thousand a year of his own, but two influences stir him: an irruptive craving to take part in the world’s dynamic activities, and the “freak” will of his late, little-lamented uncle Adrian Van Reypen Egerton, from whom he has his income and future expectations of some ten millions. Waldemar says Egerton went into the mayor’s chair with a good name and came out with a block of ice stock. The will jeers posthumously at the public Egerton despoiled, promising restitution through his heir: the residue goes to Jones, principal to be taken over after five years of continuous residence in New York City, after which the metropolis’s virus will have worked through him and he will squander his unearned fortune, returning the millions acquired by Egerton’s political activities in a poisoned shower upon the city, for which Egerton feels only contempt. Waldemar remarks that Jones aspires to disappoint that good old man; Jones says it’s human nature when a man puts a ten-million-dollar curse on you and suggests you lack a shrimp’s backbone; Bertram supplies that he naturally yearns to prove him a liar. Jones says he has no taste for dissipation, moral or financial—he wants action, something to do, and is bored in the city. Bertram calls this the wail of the unslaked romanticist; Jones protests his ambitions are practical if stirred up. Bertram says boredom is romanticism with a morning-after thirst—Jones pants for romance, something bizarre; Egypt, St. Petersburg, Buenos Ayres and Samoa have become commonplace to him, hence he waits in New York for the Adventure of Life to cat-creep up from behind and toss the lariat of rainbow dreams over his shoulders.
Waldemar suggests a hobby, noting the club is full of hobby-riders with the keenest appetite for life: old Denechaud was a misanthrope until gathering scarabs; Fenton has the finest collection of circus posters; Bellerding’s house is a museum of obsolete musical instruments; De Gay collects venomous insects from all over the world; Terriberry has a mania for old railroad tickets. Waldemar wishes he had time to be a crank, saying it’s a happy life. Asked what line he’d choose, he replies nobody has gone in for queer advertisements yet; following them up would mean all one’s leisure. Jones asks if it would be so demanding; Waldemar says decidedly, recalling a man who gave away twenty dollars daily on clues from the day’s news and wasn’t bored for lack of occupation. Jones objects that ordinary advertising is just an effort to sell something by yelling in print; Waldemar says perhaps he doesn’t look in the right place, and reads from the Universal’s classified columns: “Is there any work on God’s green earth for a man who has just _got_ to have it?” and “WANTED—A venerable looking man with white beard and medical degree. Good pay to right applicant.” Jones asks what that is; Waldemar explains it’s only a quack medical concern looking for a stall to impress their come-ons. Jones scans the paper and reads: “WANTED—Performer on B-flat trombone. Can use at once. Apply with instrument, after 1 p. m. 300 East 100th Street.” Waldemar says it seems ordinary enough; Jones asks what it’s doing in a daily paper—there must be technical publications, journals for this sort of demand. Bertram comments that when Average’s words come slow he’s interested—sure sign. Waldemar agrees it is rather misplaced. Bertram offers one that says what it means: “WANTED—At once, a brass howitzer and a man who isn’t afraid to handle it. Mrs. Anne Cullen, Pier 49½ East River.” Waldemar explains she is the woman fighting the barge combine, but it’s not so good as it looks—she’s bluffing. Jones declares with sudden conviction he’d like a shy at this business; it looks like something to do. Waldemar advises making it a business: his newspaper would be glad to pay for information Jones might collect, since they haven’t time to trace down fraudulent advertisers; if Jones started such an enterprise he’d find it amusing and at times adventurous. Jones objects he wouldn’t know how to establish it. The newspaper owner draws a rough diagram, crossing out and revising, and the final draft reads: “HAVE YOU BEEN STUNG? / Thousands have. / Thousands will be. / They’re Laying for You. / _WHO?_ / The Advertising Crooks. / A. JONES / Ad-Visor / Can Protect You Against Them. / Before Spending Your Money Call on”
The Trombone and the Armchair
Average Jones answers a newspaper advertisement seeking a B-flat trombonist with street experience, applying at “R—, 300 East 100th Street.” Between musician applicants he studies trombones and high explosives and questions his landlady about the previous lodger, “Ransom,” who came and left with little baggage, went out seldom (she suspects for drink), received parcels labeled “Glass. Handle with care,”
The Spanish Instructor’s Clue
Average Jones chafes at a four-day delay while Colonel Richford’s expedition gains a start. Relief arrives through the Spanish instructor who answered Jones’s advertisement—the same man who once served young Hoff. His former employment, it turns out, was merely translating a letter written in base Spanish. He recalls something about a lost gold mine and a reference to a map, but no geographical names, though the capital letters “B. C.” seemed to indicate a locality. He noted neither date nor signature. Doctor Hoff rushes to the atlas, but Jones says he won’t find it there; when Hoff insists on locating “B. C.,” Jones guesses it means Baja California, the Mexican peninsula. A wire to Cyrus C. Allen of the Cosmic Club, the eminent cartographer, brings back a reply: probably Laguna Salada, not on any map; seventy miles long, four to eight wide; between the Cocopah and Sierra Gigantica ranges; country very wild and arid; reachable by water from Yuma or pack train from Calexico; and White, who has hunted there, says Captain Funcke of Calexico is the best guide.
Jones then lays out the scheme for the father. The son’s two friends mapped the plan beforehand: one went west direct and was the imbecile who stopped in Cincinnati and mailed the bloody shirt to throw Hoff off the scent, while the colonel took Roderick by a sea route, probably New York and New Orleans—explaining the steamer rug and the seasickness. The colonel foresaw a hue and cry and cooked up the trip to keep his prey out of touch with newspapers during the days when Associated Press dispatches would spread the news; from New Orleans they would go west by train. Going over the son’s effects in the room above Silent Charley’s bar, Jones found a newspaper clipping marked “Daily Saw, March 29”: “LOST—Spanish letter and map. Of no value except to owner. Return to No. 16, this office, and receive heartfelt thanks.” The crooks, Jones explains, “planted” the letter and map on the son, probably slipping them into his coat pocket while he was drunk, then inserted the ad, waited until he found the letter, and casually called the advertisement to his attention. Jones will speak to his clerk, who failed to clip that ad.
Bargaining with Doctor Hoff
Hoff asks what Jones will do next; Jones says pack for the night train—to Yuma or Calexico, undecided until replies to two telegrams—and needs five hundred dollars expense money. Hoff snarls that when he hires a man he expects him to pay his own expenses and send the bill; Jones agrees but says Hoff isn’t hiring him—he’s doing this on spec and won’t invest in a dubious proposition; it isn’t too late to call it off. Hoff agrees to get the five hundred within the hour. Jones asks for a word of writing on the five thousand dollars reward; Hoff snaps that he’s good for five million dollars tomorrow in this town; Jones agrees “in writing” and wants his valued signature, frankly lacking fullest confidence in gentlemen in his line of business. Hoff promises his lawyer will draw up a contract and mail it after Jones tomorrow; Jones begins to object, then amends that it will do if things work out as figured, adding, with his significant drawl, “don’t you—er—bank on my—er—not understanding your offer—and—er—you.”
The Yuma Yucca and Captain Funcke
A telegram settles the destination: a fortnight earlier this paragraph appeared in the paid columns of the Yuma Yucca: “WANTED—Small, flat-bottomed sailboat. Centerboard type preferred. Hasty, care this office.” Jones buys a ticket for Yuma. At the station three days later he meets Captain Funcke—small, compactly built, keen-eyed, roughly dressed for the trail, with gentle, slow, hesitant speech but a competent, reliable bearing. Funcke says the wire reached him two days since and he came right up; the party left two days ago—three of them—in a flat-bottomed, narrow-beamed, sloop-rigged boat, pretty light. He knows only the big one, who calls himself Colonel Richford and had a fake copper outfit in the mountains east of Alamo. Funcke thinks they’re headed for the wildest country, likely the Pinto range southwest of the Laguna; Richford knows that country a little, having been in there two years ago. Jones says they’d want to get rid of Hoff without obvious murder, since his money is in certified checks they’d have to cash, and a body with a bullet-hole would require explaining; Funcke says nobody’d be likely to find it—only about two parties a year get down there—though somebody might trail him, and Richford is too foxy to do any killing when he can turn the trick without it.
Asked how they get there, Funcke says “Hard-ash breeze”—their rowboat is outfitted and waiting. It’s sixty miles to the turn of the Laguna, with a four-mile current to help; the quarry has a scant two days’ start, and the pursuers will catch up some, since their boat is heavier and their sail no good with the wind in this direction; if they don’t catch up, he wouldn’t want to insure young Hoff’s life. All that day and night the two men row; every muscle in the young Easterner’s back turns to live nerve-fiber and flesh strips from his palms, though the hardy captain does most of the work. Aided by the current, they turn the shoulder of the Cocopah range as dawn shines lurid in the east, and the captain swings the boat’s head to the southern shore of the lake. Between spells at the oars Jones outlines the plan.
The Water Rights Contract
Average Jones produces a contract and fountain-pen; the contract is signed and witnessed, transferring water in exchange for one revolver and ten thousand dollars in checks, which are endorsed over to A. V. R. E. Jones.
The Milk-Wagon Advertisement
Average Jones presses Mrs. Hale about the night of the theft. She remembers ten or fifteen minutes of continuous wagon-rattling below her windows and a driver calling out something about “taking the air,” but she heard no answer. Jones turns his seal ring around five times and back again, then asks whether the driver got any reply. He settles at her escritoire and writes an advertisement for the Milk-Dealers’ Journal, having reasoned that the street is the regular cross-town route for milk from a minor ferry, so the early-morning wagons were milk-vans. The notice, addressed to “MILK-DRIVERS, ATTENTION—Delaware Central mid-town route,” asks who spoke to the man outside the hotel early on the morning of August 7, offers twenty dollars, and directs answers to “Jones, Ad-Visor, Astor Court Temple, New York.”
He asks Mr. Kirby, with Mrs. Hale’s help, to find the names of everyone who gave up rooms on that floor or the floors above and below on the previous morning, and whether the hotel knows them. Mrs. Hale wonders whether he thinks the thief is still in the hotel; Jones says “Hardly,” mentions seeing “smoke from your blue fires,” and leaves still shaking his head.
The Teamster’s Twenty Dollars
Three days later a lank, husky-voiced teamster calls at the Ad-Visor office, passed ahead of the waiting line, to claim the reward. He reports seeing a man on the third-floor balcony of the Hotel Denton leaning on the rail as if sick. The teamster greeted him—”Takin’ a nip of night air, Bill?”—and got no answer, only a kind of fanning gesture and a jerk of the head backward, which he took to mean it was too hot to sleep inside. Asked to demonstrate, the teamster cups both hands and draws them toward his face. He did not see the man go in. Jones pays him the twenty, praising him as “long on sense and short on words.”
Kirby’s list of guests who gave up rooms on August 7 follows: George M. Weaver, Jr., of Utica, vouched for by the hotel; Walker Parker of New Orleans, likewise; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hull, quiet elderly people on a first visit; Henry M. Gillespie of Locke, N. Y., a middle-aged new guest; and C. F. Willard of Chicago, a ten-year patron. Jones spends a busy morning at the Denton and reports what the servants told him. Gillespie had room 168, on Mrs. Hale’s floor at the far end of the hall, and only a suitcase marked H. M. G. The porter found the room in perfect order except that one knob on the headboard of the old-fashioned bed was broken off short—a matter Gillespie never mentioned. Such a stout knob could only be broken by considerable strength exerted in a peculiar way, so something unusual happened in room 168. Kirby concludes Gillespie is their man; Jones says no, because there is no such person as Henry M. Gillespie of Locke, New York—he has sent there and found out.
Three Stones Return
Three stones of the fire-blue necklace come back through the advertised appeal. The night bartender of a sporting club brings one, bought from a man who picked it up in a gutter and could not remember where. A South Brooklyn pawnbroker demands and receives an exorbitant reward for the second. A florist in Greenwich, Connecticut, contributes the last. Jones traces their wanderings to Mrs. Hale’s fire-escape. The bartender’s stone offers no difficulty. The pawnbroker’s setting had been found on the city refuse heap by a scavenger: it fell through a grating into the hotel cellar and was swept out with the rubbish to the municipal dump. The florist’s mystery clears when Jones learns the hotel exchanged shop-worn plants with the Greenwich Floral Company; he had noticed a row of tubbed azaleas within the Denton’s ground enclosure, so the gem likely dropped from the fire-escape into a tub later shipped to the florist. The three jewels were stripped from the necklace by forcible contact with the iron rail at the very point where Jones found the “color” of precious metal. Kirby identifies them by a peculiarity in the setting as the end three, nearest the clasp at the back—a point Jones carefully notes. There the trail ends; no more stones come in.
Fishing for a Hotel Man
For three weeks Jones issues advertisements like commands, which would strike the formal-minded Kirby as a wavering intellect and which look incongruous in Jones’s scrapbook. The first, spread through Mine Host’s Weekly and other hotel-trade organs, reads: “OH, YOU HOTEL MEN! Come through with the dope on H. M. G. What’s he done to your place? Put a stamp on it and we’ll swap dates on his past performances. A. Jones, Astor Court Temple, New York City.” A later one reads: “WANTED—Slippery Sams, Human Eels, Fetter Kings etc Liberal reward to artist who sold Second-hand amateur, with instructions for use. Send full details, time and place to A. Jones, Court Temple, New York City.” Variety, the Clipper and the Billboard scatter the appeal through “the profession”; thousands read it and one answers.
The Pin-Prick Cipher
Average Jones tells Bertram there is no cipher. In the original advertisement a third of the pin-pricks touch no letters at all, and the holes themselves form letters and words. Held to the light, the perforations read: “ALL POINTS TO / YOU TAKE THE / SHORT CUT DEATH / IS EASIER THAN / SOME THINGS.” Bertram asks why Robinson did not explain this in his letter; Jones suggests either a test of his capacity or that Robinson was too frightened and rattled. Jones knows Robinson only from the directory: a commission merchant on Pearl Street living at the Caronia, an elegant and enormous apartment house, presumably well-to-do and married.
The Latin Scholar’s Ruse
Average Jones opens by declaring himself a passionate devotee of Latin, suspicious of all three current modes of pronunciation, and devoted to the ablative absolute. He has studied the Ridgway Graeme pamphlets and insists on meeting Colonel Graeme after reading them, hoping they are not long. Warren, frowning, warns him with emphasis that Colonel Graeme is a gentleman and his friend and must not be made a butt. Jones promises he shan’t be, then asks whether the colonel’s close daily association with the psychic remnant of a Roman citizen might not be against his best interest. Warren agrees he has seen it and that Jones wants to approach the colonel on his weak side, but asks whether Jones has Latin enough to sustain the part, noting the colonel is shrewd as a weasel in scholarship though a child whom anyone could fool in practical affairs. Jones admits he has not, so he will be a mute: a shock in early childhood paralyzed his speech centers; he will talk by sign language and Warren will interpret. Warren protests he hardly knows the deaf-mute alphabet; Jones says neither does he, but he will waggle his fingers if Livius says anything requiring an answer and Warren will give the proper reply. Asked whether Colonel Graeme implicitly credits the Romanism of his guest, Warren says he does because he wants to: an educated man of the classic Latin period, a friend of Cæsar, auditor of Cicero and contemporary of Virgil, Horace and Ovid, speaking in the accent the colonel has contended for, powerfully supports his theories; he is at work on a supplementary thesis. The other Latin men who have seen Livius do not know what to think of the metempsychosis claim; Livius explained his remote antecedents only after getting Colonel Graeme’s private ear, and the colonel keeps it quiet, not wanting a rabble of psychologists and soul-pokers worrying him to death. Jones calls it plain sailing for the Roman and asks to be taken there soon.
The Mute Visitor and the Watcher
At the Graeme house Average Jones is received with simple courtesy by a thin rosy-cheeked old gentleman with a dagger-like imperial and a dreamy eye, who makes him free of the unkempt old place’s hospitality. They converse, Jones maintaining his end with nods and gestures ostensibly through Warren’s digital mediumship. Warren asks where the visitor from the past is; the colonel says he is prowling among his books. Asked if they are to see him, the colonel looks embarrassed and says Livius has taken an aversion to Warren, explaining with a twinkle of malice that Livius says Warren’s Latin accent frets his nerves. Warren, obeying a quick signal from his accomplice, says he will stroll in the garden while Jones is presented to Livius.
Colonel Graeme leads the way to a lofty wing once a drawing-room, now holding thousands of books filling shelves and heaped in corners; he apologizes for the confusion, saying no one may arrange his books but himself, and that four other rooms are even more chaotic. At his voice a man seated behind a tumulus of volumes rises: perhaps forty-five, thin and sinewy, close-shaven, pale blue eyes, narrow forehead running high into a mop of grizzled locks, with a scar dimly visible diagonally across the front of the scalp through the hair. Jones glances at the stranger’s hands and notices the long slender fingers are not only mottled with dust but scuffed and in places scarified, as if hurriedly handling many books. The colonel presents the newcomer in formal Latin; the scarred man bows and makes a curious hand gesture, addressing Jones in a strange, strained accent. The colonel says “Di illi linguam astrinxere; mutus est,” indicating the younger man, and adds a sentence in sonorous metrical Greek. Jones recalls the Æschylean line, thinks that though “a great ox hath stepped on my tongue” it hasn’t trodden out his eyes, and catches the Roman’s uneasy glance. To allay suspicion he scribbles complimentary Latin sentences, sedulously coached by Warren, and withdraws to the front room, presently joined by the Johns Hopkins man; the colonel fortunately gives them a few moments together. Jones whispers to arrange for him to come daily to study in the library; the other nods. Jones says “Now, sit tight,” steps soft-footed across the thick old rug to the library door and throws it open. Just inside stands Livius with an expression of startled anger; quickly recovering, he explains in ready Latin that he was about to enter and speak to his patron. Jones whispers on withdrawal that this shows remarkable interest in possible conversation for a man who understands no English, and that Livius does him the honor to suspect him; he must have been a wily chap in the Consulship of Plancus.
The Watched Scholar
Before leaving, Jones receives from Colonel Graeme a general invitation to study among the books as much as he chooses; the old man-servant Saul has orders to admit him at any hour. He returns to his hotel to write a courteous note of acknowledgment. Many hours Jones spends more tediously than those in the cool seclusion of Colonel Ridgway Graeme’s treasure-house of print: he burrows among quaint accumulations of forgotten classics, dips with astonishment into the savage, ultra-Rabelaisian satire of Von Hutter’s “Epistolæ, Obscurorum Virorum,” which set early sixteenth-century Europe a-roar with laughter at the discomfited monks, and cleanses himself in the fresh air and free English of a splendid Audubon “first”—all the while conscious that the Roman watched, watched, watched. More than once Livius offers aid, seeking to learn the supposed mute’s line of investigation, but is smilingly fended off. At the end of four days, Average Jones, Enderby Livius, Warren, and the colonel react to a document of “utmost importance and value.” The colonel recalls buying an octavo Percival volume at the Barclay auction; it was in “very false Latin.” He remembers it slipped from his pocket into the river while crossing the ferry to Jersey.
The Ad-Visor and His Circle
Jones himself is the book’s one great invention, and the joke of him is that he is almost aggressively ordinary—a composite photograph of well-conditioned young Americans, as the first chapter puts it, relieved only by large, thoughtful eyes. His gift is the one his favorite professor named: when he chooses, he can sharpen the pencil of his mind to a very fine point. What the stories dramatize is specialization without a profession. Jones has no office hours and no clientele he needs; he takes cases because they interest him, and he is cheerfully willing to walk away from a fee when the client disgusts him. The patent-medicine poisoner Hoff learns this to his cost, and the scene in which Jones produces the endorsed checks and tears up the rest is the collection’s purest statement of its hero’s code: the work is the reward, and the money is only a way of keeping score.
Around him Adams assembles a small repertory company. Bertram, the languid club idler, supplies the prodding and the mock solemnity, and occasionally the crucial memory—it is Bertram who once commuted on the Jersey line and knows the godforsaken station of Pearlington. Waldemar, the newspaper owner with the heavy face of good-humored power, supplies the institutional muscle: a press-clipping bureau, a word in the right ear, the machinery of a great daily behind a young man’s hobby. And then there are the clients, who arrive in a steady parade of types—the terrified chemist, the frantic father, the diplomat in a “pale pink funk,” the stolid club bore Spofford who longs to distinguish himself and cannot. Adams’s running joke about Spofford is that heroism is not transferable: told to imagine twenty-odd rats leaving a ten-story building at midnight, he can produce only platitudes, and the reader sees exactly why Jones is Jones.
The Method, and What It Is For
The detective work in these stories is deliberately unglamorous. Jones does not deduce from armchairs; he advertises, he interviews landladies and teamsters and night bartenders, he hires a trombonist for a dollar a night, he steams envelopes over a radiator jet. His own summary of the craft comes in the Red Dot case, when he insists that about half of it is “the ability to recognize and connect coincidences”—the escape of the bred spiders, the dead dogs on Golden Hill, the child in Galvin’s Alley, the red-dot letters left on a desk instead of destroyed. The same humility shapes his reading of the pin-prick letters: the cipher is no cipher at all, only holes that form words when held to the light. Adams’s pleasure is in the plain physical detail that cracks a case—a broken knob on an old bedstead, mud rather than sand on a coat shoulder, a row of tubbed azaleas shipped to a Greenwich florist, a newspaper advertisement advising the use of fish bait two months after bass season closed.
What the cases are for is another matter, and here the book turns darker than its club-room banter suggests. The villains are not master criminals but institutions and their instruments: the Canned Meat Trust, which sets an amateur entomologist to slip venomous spiders through a keyhole rather than let a chemist’s evidence reach the courts; the Turkish official Telfik Bey, struck down in his hotel room by an Armenian who calls himself not a murderer but an avenger; the swindlers who plant a false Spanish map on a drunkard’s son and lead him toward a desert grave. Jones’s argument in the Dorr case—that a trust facing only loss will commit forgery or arson, but a trust facing jail will commit murder just as determinedly, in self-defense—is the collection’s coldest sentence, and Adams means it. The Mercy Sign stories push furthest: the poison brewed in the Hackensack Meadows, the blowpipe and the putty balls mistaken for spirit rappings, the cabinet marked DANGER that kills eight little fishes when Jones drops it overboard. The avenger’s confession, read aloud from a French journal, is a long way from the Cosmic Club.
A Period Piece with Sharp Teeth
The book belongs to its moment—the era of the great newspapers, the classified columns dense with quackery and “Personals,” the trust as a fact of commercial life—and it wears that moment openly. Its pleasures are the pleasures of the form at its best: a fair puzzle, a clean solution, a hero whose eccentricity is a kind of moral hygiene. But Adams is after something more than puzzles. Each case is a small study in how the modern city hides its cruelties in plain print, where a want-ad for a trombonist can be a machine for murder and a church-society lecture notice can carry a death threat. Jones reads the page the way his creator hopes we will: as a record of what people are willing to do to one another, and occasionally of what one person will do to stop them.
