I could not well allow myself to cut this article short at this point, although my tale is, properly speaking, finished, and my contract under this head, with my publishers, fulfilled. There is something so marvellous in the human heart in the way of its disposition to adventure in order to make money easily; such a wonderful credulity in the minds of large numbers of people, and a willingness to fasten in trust upon the merest shadow of success, that perhaps these fraudulent concerns will never lack victims. But in studying the correspondence which fell into my hands,--over twenty thousand letters,--and with which I beguiled many hours during the six months in which I kept them, before burning them, I became apprised of the fact that the great majority of the "customers" of these concerns are illiterate; most of their letters being misspelled; that great numbers of them were young men, boys, and poor women; nearly all evidently mechanics, and from some of the States, such as Pennsylvania, many farmers. (Pennsylvania, by the way, furnishes more victims to petty frauds, I learned, than several other States which I might name, taken together.) She has a large number of citizens who are barely able to read and write poorly, and who probably do not read the public journals extensively, and are, therefore, not likely to be well informed of the current iniquities of the time. I seriously meditated, after having studied the "G. W. Huntington & Co." correspondence, the writing of a book on the matter of Swindling, in general; and this correspondence would have afforded me many pathetic things for comment. While looking over that correspondence, the tears often came irresistibly to my eyes. I recollect the letter of a boy writing from Easton, Penn., I think it was. He had, it appeared from his letter, sent many dollars to the company for tickets, a dollar at a time, and winning nothing from his ventures, was getting discouraged. He wrote an imploring letter at last, accompanied by a dollar, in which he begged the company to choose him a winning number. He told them it was his last dollar; (he was but sixteen years old, he said); that he should not be able to send again, if he failed this time, for he had to give every cent he could earn; (I forget what he said he worked at, but he named the business and the pitiable wages he got); that his father was a dreadful drunkard; one of his little sisters was "sick all the while;" another had broken her leg two months before, and the doctors thought she might have to lose it, and so on, a pitiable tale--a tale to stir the hardest heart, and written in that style which stamped it as undoubtedly true. At the bottom of this letter was a note for the clerk, in the handwriting of one of the firm. "Write to" (somebody, I forget his name, of course), "at Easton, and learn if this story is true; and if it is, let the boy draw five dollars in Scheme No." (so and so.) There was a note dated