What Morton said had no effect on me; I clung to Gutterglory, and made his life worth while. I was given my return when I learned that for years he had gone about, unknown to me, extorting money from people with the use of my name. Scores have paid peace-money to Gutterglory, and thought it was I who bled them. So much are we at the mercy of rascals who win our confidence! It was the fact of his learning that did it. I could never be called a good judge of one who knew books. I was over prone to think him of finest honor who wrote himself a man of letters, for it was my weakness to trust where I admired. In the end, I discovered the villain duplicity of Gutterglory, and cast him out; at that, the scoundrel was rich with six figures to his fortune, and every dime of it the harvest of some blackmail in my name. He became a great fop, did Gutterglory; and when last I saw him--it being Easter Day, as I stepped from the Cathedral, where I'd been with Blossom--he was teetering along Fifth Avenue, face powdered and a glow of rouge on each cheekbone, stayed in at the waist, top hat, frock coat, checked trousers, snowy “spats” over his patent leathers, a violet in his buttonhole, a cane carried endwise in his hand, elbows crooked, shoulders bowed, the body pitched forward on his toes, a perfect picture of that most pitiful of things--an age-seamed doddering old dandy! This was he whom the Reverend Bronson vaunted as an ally! “You are welcome to Gutterglory,” said I to my reverend visitor on that time when he named him as one to become eloquent for reform. “It but proves the truth of what Big John Kennedy so often said: Any rogue, kicked out of Tammany Hall for his scoundrelisms, can always be sure of a job as a 'reformer.'” “Really!” observed Morton, when a few days later I was telling him of the visit of the Reverend Bronson, “I've a vast respect for Bronson. I can't say that I understand him--working for nothing among the scum and rubbish of humanity!--for personally I've no talent for religion, don't y' know! And so he thinks that honesty is the best policy!” “He seemed to think it not open to contradiction.” “Hallucination, positive hallucination, my boy! At-least, if taken in a money sense; and 'pon my word! that's the only sense in which it's worth one's while to take anything--really! Honesty the best policy! Why, our dominie should look about him. Some of our most profound scoundrels are our richest men. Money is so much like water, don't y' know, that it seems always to seek the lowest places;” and with that, Morton went his elegant way, yawning behind his hand, as if to so much exert his intelligence wearied him.