“I am living here,” he said. “I saw you crossing the street, and did not know whether to hail you or not. I fancied that, after what you know of me, you would not speak to me.” “Then you do not know me,” I replied. “You never injured me, if you did commit a grievous offense. It is a great mistake to cast every one down as soon as he commits an error. It is no way to recover him. It only discourages him, and renders him indifferent about reforming.—I have just hired a room on Pine street. Come with me, and tell me all about it.” We walked up Pine street, and were soon sitting in my room. There he told me all that had happened to him. He had eluded the law, and fled with his ill-gotten ten thousand dollars to California, where, he said, he saw no rest, day or night. He declared that when I knew him as a pious young man, he was all that he appeared to be; but said that, by and by, he began to be tempted to take advantage of the excellent opportunity he had to acquire a large amount of money; and, in an evil moment, yielded. He did not remain in California three weeks, he said, before his conscience compelled him to return to Pennsylvania and restore the ill-gotten cash to its owner; which, he said, he had recently done. He had now determined, he remarked, never to yield to temptation again, and was resolved to atone for the past by a future life of integrity and uprightness; he now had a position as salesman in a wholesale house in Saint Louis, and was doing well. He gave me the name of the house, and asked me to call and see him. He remarked that he could freely confide in one who had so readily overlooked his former disgrace. I replied that, as a matter of course, it would injure him for his employers to know his past history, that I believed he was sincere in his good resolution, and that he need not feel apprehensive that I should ever cast a stumbling-block in his way. The strictly “pious,” with the blindness that too often characterizes them, may censure me for not warning his employers; but let them do so. Do they think, that when a man commits one crime, he is necessarily lost, forever? Suppose I should have regarded it as a duty to go to his employers and tell them what I knew of Hague? He would have been discharged at once, because they could never have relied on him. He would then have despaired of recovering from the effects of that one error; and no matter how good his intentions might have been, while his prospects were bright, he would, probably, have turned a rogue again, on the first opportunity, because he had no other alternative.