I now felt quite sure of my game; but was confident enough that I should find that the young man bore some other name than "Worden." Suffice it that it was the work of a couple of days only before I had my man in tow, knew all about him, his antecedents, etc. His family was good. He had been prepared for college, at the Columbia College Grammar School; was a young man of fair average capacity, but by his dissipations managed to make himself an eyesore to his family. His father, who was a well-to-do, if not rich merchant, doing business in Maiden Lane, had, in order to "reform" him, "given him up," and ordered him to shirk for himself, something like a year before this. He went into a grocery store, being unable to get work elsewhere, and had done very well for three or four months; but there was a private room in the back of the store where liquor was sold by the glass--one of those places which are now known by the felicitous name, "Sample Rooms," the disgusting frequency of which all over New York, and in many other cities, is so remarkable; places which are really worse than the open bars of hotels, or the regular "gin mills" (if I may be permitted to use the vulgar phrase), because in these sly, half-private places is it that most young men learn to drink, and here it is, too, where many a man, too respectable to be seen frequenting the open liquor stores of his vicinity, steals in and guzzles his potations, on the sure road to a drunkard's fate--failure in business, ruined constitution, and final poverty and disgrace. Here the young man, "Worden," as he now called himself, had fallen in with genial company, who came to his employers to "buy groceries," and to drink, and among them had made the acquaintance, in particular, of a down-town "banker," who boarded in the vicinity of the grocery, which was on the corner of Bleecker Street and ----. This banker was a fascinating fellow, and young Worden soon fell in love with him. By and by he found out what sort of a "banker" was his new-made friend--the same who kept the day gambling-rooms on the corner of Fulton and Broadway. It is astonishing how little one may know of the business of his neighbors whom he meets every day in New York, unless he takes special pains to find out. The "solitude of a great city" is no mere Byronic fancy. One could hardly be more solitary in the dense woods than a man may be in the midst of the throngs of men and women he may meet in New York. He sees them--that is all. His heart is closed to them, and theirs to him, as much as if they were in China, and he the "lone man" on some island of the West Indies. So that "banker" passed for a rich, active, business man, in the vicinity of Bleecker Street and ----, within less than a mile, perhaps, of this nefarious den. Young Worden was easily led on till he got to neglecting his business when sent out on errands, or down town to the wholesale grocers; and finally the grocer discharged him for neglect of business;