I was called on one day by a Western merchant, an old man, by the name of King. He was a New Yorker by birth, he said, born in a place called Janesville, in Saratoga County, where he had lived to maturity, had then done business in New York City till he had reached beyond middle age, when, failing in business, he had retired to some land he had, in the course of business, acquired in Illinois; but finding farming irksome, had managed to open a little country store, which had grown upon his hands until he had, in the process of time, become rich, and was in the habit of visiting his old home in Saratoga County every year, and also coming on to the city, sometimes to select goods, though his junior partners came down at the same time, and did the principal business. The old man had learned to drink whiskey at the West, in order to keep off the "fever-na-gur," as he called it, and at the time of visiting me, had evidently not gotten over his last "fuddle" at home, some weeks before, or had somehow managed to get abundance of that creature comfort--"old rye"--in New York; not that he was drunk, but he was "keyed up" to a good pitch--a height from which he surveyed all the glory of the King family, and felt that nothing but royal blood flowed in his own veins; and who knows but the blood was royal? It might have been the whiskey, however,--but what matters it? The old man descanted a long time on the glory of his ancestry, and the pride of his race; claimed relationship to the great Rufus King of New York, and all the Kings by name, who were of any account; spoke of their natural pride; said that they were always ready to avenge any insult to their name, come from what source it might, and so forth, and so forth. It was in vain that I interrupted him at times at the end of a sentence, in order to ask him to come to the point. Talk he would, in his own way; and as he was a white-haired man, the outlines of whose face showed that he was a gentleman when not in liquor, especially (and he was thoroughly gentlemanly at the time, though vexatiously garrulous), I thought I would let him have his talk out in his own way. At last he got to tell me that some months before he had been swindled out of a dollar, and that a large number of the King family, he had recently learned, had each been defrauded to the amount of a dollar, and that some of them, moved by family pride, had, as he had been informed, made effort to discover and punish the defrauding parties, but had failed. He felt his pride wounded at this. The King family had made an effort to find out the parties who had so questioned their good sense as to successfully swindle them, and such a number of them, too--and failed. This he could not endure. If all that had been lost had been wheedled out of one member of the family, if he himself, for example, had been the only victim, he could have endured that, and would, for the pride of the name, have endured it in silence. But the whole race had been