In truth, the firm was a mystery in Wall Street, and its largest creditors were in the greatest darkness concerning it. Some one has truly said that in a great commercial city men are known only by their enterprises and their successes; that their antecedents become lost in the magnitude and rapidity with which events revolve. This is particularly so with us. The firm of Topman & Gusher had fixed itself in Pearl Street, and gone quietly into business without friends, acquaintances, or endorsers; and in a single year had secured both credit and respectability. And it had done this on what is too frequently mistaken for energy and enterprise--show and pretension. Upon Chapman's shoulders, however, the crushing effect of this great disaster fell heaviest. Stripped of all he had, ruined, disgraced, he stood like one amazed at the suddenness of his own fall. He had built his castles on sand, and now found them tumbling down, and crushing him under the ruin. His avaricious nature had led him, not only to wrong, but to bring distress and ruin on the unsuspecting and simple-minded Dutch settlers. The wheel of fortune was turned now. He had himself been ruined, betrayed, and disgraced by the very men he had put confidence in and made partners of his guilt. He also had set a snare and invented a plot by which he expected to strip honest old Hanz Toodleburg of his property, and now he had been caught in it himself. His daughter, Mattie, had already disclosed to him the fact that she had overheard the conversation between him and Topman, relative to the manner of entrapping Hanz, and knew the secret of their plot. And she had appealed to him to save her the pain of bearing testimony that would conflict with his, to save an honest old man from poverty. The man of great progressive ideas now found it necessary to invent some way of escaping from what he saw would be worse than ruin and disgrace--a criminal's doom. His name had not appeared in the suit Topman & Gusher brought against Hanz Toodleburg. Oh, no. Chapman was needed as a witness to prove the signing of the papers, and all the circumstances relating to the sale of the secret of Kidd's treasure. Poverty and misfortune had now stepped in to purify and direct a smitten conscience.