It would be next to impossible for the imagination most fertile in wicked invention to conceive anything more devilish and mischievous, or an evil that might be perpetrated with less fear of detection. The mainspring of the pretty scheme is not to impose on the benevolence and credulity of the living, but to blast and vilify the character of the dead. To obliterate from the hearts of those who were nearest and dearest to him—the husband dead and buried—all kindly remembrance of him; to tear, as it were, from his poor honest body the white shroud in which tender hands had enveloped it, and show him to have lived and died a traitor, a hypocrite, and an impostor, false to that very last breath with which he bade his wife, his “only darling,” farewell; and this that some cold-blooded ruffian may extort from the wronged man’s duped indignant survivors a few miserable pounds or shillings, as the case may be. The process by which the villany in question may be accomplished is much more simple than would at first appear. The prime condition of the impostor’s success is that he must reside at a long distance from those it is his intention to dupe. The swindler lives in France or Germany, sometimes as far away as America. The first “move” is to look into the newspaper obituary notices for a likely victim. A gentleman who dies young, leaving a wife and a numerous family to bemoan their bitter bereavement, is not uncommonly the case fixed on. If, during his lifetime, he was a man who, from his station in life, must have been tolerably well known, so much the better. It is a woman who writes the letter. She writes of course to the individual as though not in the least suspecting that he is dead. The following _genuine_ copy of such a letter will, better than anything, illustrate the cold, cruel, subtle villany essential to the success of the “Dead-man’s lurk,” as in the profession it is styled: “My ever-dearest Robert,—It is only after enduring the sickening disappointment that has attended my last three letters sent to the old address, that I venture to write to your private abode, in the fervent hope that this my desperate appeal to your oft-tried generosity may fall into no other hands but your own.