I had dawdled for two hours over coffee in the café--the room and the employment which had one-time brought me fortune--but was incapable of any thought of value. I could decide on nothing good. Indeed, I did naught save mentally curse those revenue miscreants who, failing of blackmail, had destroyed me for revenge. Whatever comfort may lurk in curses, at least they carry no money profit; so after a fruitless session over coffee and maledictions, I arose, and as a calmative, walked down Broadway. At Trinity churchyard, the gates being open, I turned in and began ramblingly to twine and twist among the graves. There I encountered a garrulous old man who, for his own pleasure, evidently, devoted himself to my information. He pointed out the grave of Fulton, he of the steamboats; then I was shown the tomb of that Lawrence who would “never give up the ship;” from there I was carried to the last low bed of the love-wrecked Charlotte Temple. My eye at last, by the alluring voice and finger of the old guide, was drawn to a spot under the tower where sleeps the Lady Cornbury, dead now as I tell this, hardby two hundred years. Also I was told of that Lord Cornbury, her husband, once governor of the colony for his relative, Queen Anne; and how he became so much more efficient as a smuggler and a customs cheat, than ever he was as an executive, that he lost his high employ. Because I had nothing more worthy to occupy my leisure, I listened--somewhat listlessly, I promise you, for after all I was thinking on the future, not the past, and considering of the living rather than those old dead folk, obscure, forgotten in their slim graves--I listened, I say, to my gray historian; and somehow, after I was free of him, the one thing that remained alive in my memory was the smuggling story of our Viscount Cornbury. Among those few acquaintances I formed during my brief prosperity, was one with a gentleman named Harris, who owned apartments under mine on Twenty-second Street. Harris was elegant, educated, traveled, and apparently well-to-do of riches. Busy with my own mounting fortunes, the questions of who Harris was? and what he did? and how he lived? never rapped at the door of my curiosity for reply. One night, however, as we sat over a late and by no means a first bottle of wine, Harris himself informed me that he was employed in smuggling; had a partner-accomplice in the Customs House, and perfect arrangements aboard a certain ship. By these last double advantages, he came aboard with twenty trunks, if he so pleased, without risking anything from the inquisitiveness or loquacity of the officers of the ship; and later debarked at New York with the certainty of going scatheless through the customs as rapidly as his Inspector partner could chalk scrawlingly “O. K.” upon his sundry pieces of baggage.