The Midnight Burglar of C Street
A steamboat captain's home defense operation turns into a musical misunderstanding involving a cat.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I thought sure there was a burglar in the house last night,' said a well-known steamboat man this morning. He told of a little adventure he had while sleeping at his home on C Street. The family dog treed something in the woodshed and was making noise enough to raise the dead. The sailor, keenly alive to the situation, seized a revolver of large dimensions, and standing in the cold early morning, waited for the burglar to come out. Quiet finally reigned and he returned to bed. Just as he was sinking into morning repose, something moved on the bed. In the darkness, it looked like a man's arm moving across the foot of the bed. The man gave a yell and made a lunge for the burglar. The struggle awakened the family, but his lunge only succeeded in knocking the cat from the foot of the bed. The cat, astonished at the rough treatment, jumped upon the piano, and the neighbors say that the rumpus the animal made as it cantered up and down the keyboard sounded like Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata.' The burglar is still at large.
“The cat, astonished at the rough treatment, jumped upon the piano, and the neighbors say that the rumpus the animal made as it cantered up and down the keyboard sounded like Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata.'”
This whimsical incident highlights the pervasive anxiety of early 20th-century residential life, where fears of crime were often tempered by the mundane chaos of domestic animals. It captures a moment of local color in an era before modern home security technology.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.