My Library

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