himself my friend, but who is the direct cause of most of the evil I have for ten years experienced. This fellow pretended to deal in lands. I put nine hundred dollars--half I had in the world--in this man’s hands, to purchase a fine little place of a few acres, which place he took me to see. I was pleased with it, and saw a home for those who would be left behind me when I was dead. A few days thereafter this ghoul came to me again, and represented that gold bullion being down he could make considerable profit for me in three days, would I make the investment. I handed over the remainder of my money. The three days lengthened into years. Instead of being a capitalist he was a bankrupt--was not in the gold business, and had no more control of the land he showed me than he had of Victoria’s crown. Meantime, my furniture was seized; I lost my name with the friend who advanced the sum; I became ill, and, in my agony, called this man a swindler. To silence me, he gave me a check on a bank. I presented it. ‘No funds!’ And yet he dared call himself an honest man. ‘You have but to unsay the harsh things said about me,’ said this semblance of a man to me one day, ‘and I am ready to pay you everything I owe.’ My mind was unsettled; I listened to him, and the result was that, by duplicity and fraud, more mean and despicable than the first, if there be a depth of villainy more profound, he obtained my signature to an acknowledgment that the money of which he had openly swindled me, then in his hands, was ‘a friendly loan.’ And then he laughed, ‘Ha! ha!’ and he laughed, ‘Ho! ho!’ at me and my misery, and actually suffered a child in our family to perish and wretchedly die for the want of food and medicine. But then he told me that he had buried it properly, respectably, up there in the cemetery, and it was the only truth I ever heard from his lips. But then he sent the funeral bills for me to pay--all the while laughing at my misery--while the lordly house he occupied was redeemed from forced sale with my money, and himself and his feasted luxuriously every day on what was the price of _my heart’s blood_! Still, they all laughed, ‘Ha! ha!’ and grew fat on my blood. I still have the memory of a dead child, up there in the cemetery. Poor starved child! It is no satisfaction to me to know that this man will die a disgraced pauper, dependent on charity for bread. Still less is it to realize, as I do, that the brothel and the gibbet, the gambling hell and massive prisons, are shadowed in the foreground of his line, and that it will utterly perish from off the earth in ignominy and horror. I would not have it so, but fate is fate; and I see, at least, one dangling form of his race swinging in the air! My prophetic eye beholds----”