It was near midsummer when one of the city postmen of Philadelphia entered a large warehouse in the business part of that city. He approached the principal desk with a bundle of papers and letters on one arm, from which he drew a single letter bearing the New Orleans post-mark. A young man who stood at the desk writing what appeared to be business notes, of which a pile, damp with ink, lay at his elbow, took the letter, and thrusting his pen back of one ear, prepared to open it. There was an appearance of great and even slovenly haste about this letter. The paper was folded unevenly. The wax had been dropped upon it in a rude mass, and was roughly stamped with a blurred impression which it would have been difficult to make out. The address was blotted, and every thing about it bore marks of rough haste. The young merchant broke open the seal with some trepidation, for the singular appearance of the letter surprised him not a little. He read half a dozen of the first lines, then looking over his shoulder as if afraid some one might see that which he had read, he turned his back to the desk and was soon wholly absorbed in the contents of the epistle. As he turned over the page, you would have seen the color gradually deepen upon his cheeks, and even flush up to the forehead, as if there was something in the epistle which did not altogether please him. After a little he folded the letter, compressing his lips the while, and fell into deep thought. The service which this letter required of him was one against which every honest feeling of his heart revolted; but his worldly prospects, his hopes of advancement in life, all depended upon the writer. Ross had been his friend; had placed him in the Philadelphia branch of a great commercial house; and to thwart one of his wishes might prove absolute ruin. Ross had omitted in that epistle nothing that could persuade or reason into wrong. It was doubtful, he said, even if Clark ever had been married to Zulima; or, being so, if he would not deem it a good service in his friends to relieve him of the obligations imposed by that union. Bitter and cruel were the accusations urged against that poor young wife; and with his interests all with her enemies, joined to a lively desire to think ill of her, in order to justify his conduct to his own heart, this weak and cruel man yielded himself to become the tool of a deeper and far more unprincipled villain than himself. Again and again he perused that letter, and at length put it carefully away in his breast-pocket, close to a heart which its evil folds were doomed to harden against the secret whisperings of a conscience that would not be entirely hushed.