“In accepting the Presidency of the Honduras National Lottery Company (Louisiana State Lottery Company) I shall not surrender the Presidency of the Gulf Coast Ice and Manufacturing Company, of Bay St. Louis, Miss. “Therefore address all proposals for supplies, machinery, etc., as well as all business communications, to “PAUL CONRAD, Puerto Cortez, Honduras, “Care Central America Express, “FORT TAMPA CITY, “FLORIDA, U. S. A.” You have probably read this advertisement often, and enjoyed the naïve manner in which Mr. Conrad asks for correspondence on different subjects, especially on that relating to “all business communications,” and how at the same time he has so described his whereabouts that no letters so addressed would ever reach his far-away home in Puerto Cortez, but would be promptly stopped at Tampa, as he means that they should. After my anonymous friend had told me of Puerto Cortez, I read of it on the programme with a keener interest, and Puerto Cortez became to me a harbor of much mysterious moment, of a certain dark significance, and of possible adventure. I remembered all that the lottery had been before the days of its banishment, and all that it had dared to be when, as a corporation legally chartered by the State of Louisiana, it had put its chain and collar upon legislatures and senators, judges and editors, when it had silenced the voice of the church and the pulpit by great gifts of money to charities and hospitals, so giving out in a lump sum with one hand what it had taken from the people in dollars and half-dollars, five hundred and six hundred fold, with the other. I remembered when its trade-mark, in open-faced type, “La. S. L.,” was as familiar in every newspaper in the United States as were the names of the papers themselves, when it had not been excommunicated by the postmaster-general, and it had not to hide its real purpose under a carefully worded paragraph in theatrical programmes or on “dodgers” or handbills that had an existence of a moment before they were swept out into the street, and which, as they were not sent through mails, were not worthy the notice of the federal government.