Metropolitan Diary: Chasing, and Catching, a Purse Snatcher April 25, 2012, 9:22 am My New York apartment overlooked a crossing of two streets in the Village. You could hear and see a lot from there. One day I heard loud screams and ran to the corner window to look. Down the block a well-dressed middle-aged woman was doing the screaming. Apparently the woman's purse had just been snatched, because a short person in white pants and shirt, hugging a large black handbag, was racing toward my building and the intersection. Meanwhile a stout professorial man, probably the victim's companion, was pelting after the thief. Coming toward the intersection from the uptown side was Duke, an elderly Great Dane belonging to the antique shop up the block. Excited by the sight of a running person, Duke gamboled forward playfully. The thief tried to turn back, flew horizontally into the air, and fell face-down on the sidewalk, legs still running. Duke gently put his huge mouth over one of those kicking legs. The thief froze. The puffing gentleman caught up. He immediately sat down on the thief. Duke sat down nearby. A small crowd gathered. The butcher came out of his shop and gave Duke a steak, which he ate. The cops arrived and talked to the professor and to the woman, no longer screaming, who had reached the scene by then. The cops put the shaken but unharmed thief in their cop car and drove away. The crowd dispersed. Event over: except that my upstairs neighbor, who had been in the crowd, rang my doorbell and told me one detail I had not been able to discern from the window: the purse snatcher was a woman.