And Lorns, as we came away, told me. Once a week it was the practice of each inspector to split off twenty per cent, of his pillage. He would, thus organized, pay a visit to his chief, the worthy Betel-nut Jack. As they gossiped, Jack’s ever-ready hospitality would cause him to retire for a moment to the bedroom in search of a demijohn of personal whisky. While alone in the parlor, the visiting inspector would place his contribution between the leaves of “Josephus,” and thereby the humiliating, if not dangerous, passage of money from hand to hand was missed. There existed but one further trait of caretaking forethought belonging with the worthy Betelnut Jack. It would have come better had others of that crooked clique of customs copied Betelnut Jack in this last cautious characteristic. Justice is a tortoise, while rascality’s a hare; yet justice though shod with lead wins ever the race at last. Betelnut Jack knew this; and while getting darkly rich with the others, he was always ready for the fall. While his comrades drove fast horses, or budded brown-stone fronts, or affected extravagant opera and supper afterward with those painted lilies, in whose society they delighted, Betelnut Jack clung to his old rude Bowery nest of sticks and straws and mud, and lived on without a change his Bowery life. He suffered no improvements whether of habit or of habitat, and provoked no question-asking by any gilded new prosperities of life. As fast as Betelnut Jack got money, he bought United States bonds. With each new thousand, he got a new bond, and tucked it safely away among its fellows. These pledges of government he kept packed in a small hand-bag; this stood at his bed’s head, ready for instant flight with him. When the downfall did occur, as following sundry years of loot and customs pillage was the desperate case, Betelnut Jack with the earliest whisper of peril, stepped into his raiment and his calfskin boots, took up his satchel of bonds, and with over six hundred thousand dollars of those securities--enough to cushion and make pleasantly sure the balance of his days--saw the last of the Bowery, and was out of the country and into a corner of safety as fast as ship might swim. But now you grow impatient; you would hear in more of detail concerning what went forward behind the curtains of Customs in those later ’60’s. For myself, I may tell of no great personal exploits. I did not remain long in revenue service; fear, rather than honesty, forced me to resign; and throughout that brief period of my office holding, youth and a lack of talent for practical iniquity prevented my main employment in those swart transactions which from time to time took place. I was liked, I was trusted; I knew what went forward and in the end I had my share of the ill profits; but the plans and, usually, the work came from others of a more subtile and experienced venality.