Anxious to begin life afresh, I had sought a strange city and under a new name had attempted to do it, but fate was horribly, relentlessly cruel. What would I do? where could I turn? I had only five dollars in the world, and that wouldn’t carry me far. Alas, I was not unlike the hunted rabbit. I had been the victim of a cruel game of life. It was a most critical period at which I had arrived. The fatal line must soon be crossed. Good and evil would fight out their battle. In the jail at Keene I had been besieged by thoughts that made me shudder, but the evil that battered my soul now was as the blackness of hell in comparison. Bitterness was rapidly eating into my worst nature; the tender words of a fond father and the sweet prayers of a loving mother were fast becoming far-off sounds in my dulled ears. Recollections of the sort that sear consciences came to the fore, uppermost being the words I had heard from the lips of an old conductor of the Fitchburg railway, not far from my home. I had often been with him on his trips and talked with him, for he was well known to me in my youthful days. How well I remembered the words. They burn in my brain even to-day, as well they should, for they played a strong part in the influence which sent me on to a life of reaching out for that which was not lawfully mine. “See that fine property?” this conductor said to me one day, as he pointed out a big country residence; and when I nodded assent, he added, “Well, I’ve got a first mortgage on that.” Presently he said, with a meaning I could not misunderstand, “We conductors have the name of knocking down fares, so we may as well have the game.” Twice on the trip he made that remark. For several years the meaning of the words “name” and “game” lay dormant in my mind, but how freshly it came back to me in the moment of my standing balanced between the narrow path of rectitude and the broad road of crime. Homeless, desolate, hunted like a real criminal, a reward hanging over my head, made a good soil in which the seeds of evil deeds might take quick root. To whom in this extremity might I turn? I asked this question of myself many times, and the only reply was the echo of my own words. There was a Boston man in the city with whom I was well acquainted, and who knew my side of the case thoroughly, and whose sympathy I had. I must have some money, therefore I appealed to him, and he loaned me twenty dollars. This, with five I had, constituted my cash capital. The remainder of it was my brain, and it shall be seen to what purpose I put it, ere many days passed.