Roxy Hastings

This issue of The Select Series (No. 55, August 20, 1890) contains "Roxy Hastings; or, A Raffle for Life" by P. Hamilton Myers. The melodramatic narrative concerns a fourteen-year-old girl named Caroline (Carry) who playfully asks a bank teller, Charley Lee, to lock her inside the vault as a prank on her father, the cashier. Lee complies but subsequently forgets the combination numbers to the triple-lock mechanism. As Caroline becomes trapped in the airless vault, desperate measures ensue: the cashier dispatches clerks to locate the absent porter who knows the correct sequence, while manufacturers' representatives confirm the vault cannot be breached for twelve to fifteen hours. The narrative builds suspense through failed attempts to retrieve the combination and urgent searches throughout Brooklyn and New York. The text breaks mid-sentence as messengers pursue the porter in a race against time.