"I dare not ask your forgiveness for the trouble I am bringing upon you; for I realize all too clearly the extent of the wrong I have done you. But I feel irresistibly impelled to lay before you in all their nakedness, as I do before my own conscience, the circumstances which have led to my downfall. A knowledge of these may perhaps enable you to understand, in a measure, the temptation to which I have succumbed; although I find it hard myself, now that all is over, to realize how I came to yield to it. "Perhaps you may remember the celebration of my fiftieth anniversary. We were having a most enjoyable evening in the company of the friends whom you had invited to participate in the festivities, when a caller was announced. I was obliged to leave our guests in order to receive him in the library. This man lost no time in stating the nature of his business with me. His name was Thomas Chatham; he was an expert accountant, who had been employed at the Knickerbocker bank to examine the books, and he coolly informed me that he had just discovered a serious error in my books--one that had enabled a depositor to overdraw his account by a large amount. At first I refused to believe him, although he submitted copies from the books showing exactly how the blunder had been made. When he intimated that it only rested with me whether the error should be reported to the bank, I indignantly refused to listen to him. He remained perfectly unruffled during our interview and left me at last with the statement that he would wait twenty-four hours before handing in his report to the president. "My first step on reaching the bank the next day was to verify Chatham's statements. Alas! they were only too true. There was the terrible blunder staring me in the face. I could not understand how I had come to make it; but there it was, and nothing could explain it away. I had hoped against hope up to this time; now I saw clearly that I was a ruined man. "There was only one honorable course open to me--to frankly confess my responsibility for the blunder and take the consequences, whatever they might be. I hesitated, and I was lost. "I hesitated because I felt that my position was at stake. Would not my error appear inexcusable to the officers of the bank, since I could find no palliation for it in my own eyes. I was fifty years old. I shrank from the necessity of beginning again at the foot of the ladder which I had so laboriously climbed after a lifetime of conscientious plodding. It would be no easy matter for me to find another position.