Youth is the season of luxury and enjoyment. Joy is evanescent; and grief, in the young bosom, is but the sudden o’ercasting of a summer sky; the cloud passes away, and the bow of promise is bent in the now smiling heavens. Thus was it with Bradley’s grief; a few short weeks in New Orleans did wonders; they initiated him in the mysteries and delights of the gaming table; they did more: they introduced him to the lowest haunts of vice and infamy, cloaked, indeed, for the decoy of this rich windfall; but so thin and flimsy was the protecting veil of decency and morality, that any other than Bradley Spencer’s eyes would have pierced the wily folds, and laid bare the monsters lurking behind them. Thus early possessed with the fatal passion of gaming, night after night saw the infatuated youth wound deeper and deeper in the toils of his betrayers. Mortgage after mortgage was given,—though not having a shadow of legality about them, they were accepted as eagerly by these human leeches, as the red gold for which they had sold their souls to perdition. The men with whom it was Spencer’s fate to become connected, were most of them from thirty to forty years of age; wily, unprincipled villains, well calculated to govern the simple youth, whom they remorselessly plundered of all at his present command, and accepted his honor as pledge for the rest, when he should become of age. Nor were the months tardy in their flight. At the end of two short years, his property was formally yielded by his passive guardian, and the day that gave him house and land, stock and slave, saw him resign it to the fiends who had possessed him with a love of all that was degrading to human nature, and taught him to scoff at all who were truly poor and virtuous. It is the same Bradley Spencer, kind reader, whose brief career we have endeavored to trace, that we left in the little village, with his knavish companions, who, fresh from the hiding places of loathsome vice, were intent on drawing the young man into yet greater depths of wickedness. But they struck upon the wrong chord—Spencer had been culpable, most culpable, it is true, but he was to himself his worst foe; he had not willingly injured others, but had been the dupe, in every instance. Thus, when his brutal comrade expressed his determination to _rob_ one of the habitations before them, and urged his assistance, his nobler spirit that had slept so long, was aroused, and he gave vent to his feelings in the manner we have described.