patronized by the beauty, fashion and sorrow of the city. In short, I
was in a very prosperous way of business, and within a year was able to
send for my parents and establish my old father very comfortably as a
receiver of stolen goods--an act which I confess was saved from the
reproach of filial gratitude only by my exaction of all the profits.

But the vicissitudes of fortune are avoidable only by practice of the
sternest indigence: human foresight cannot provide against the envy of
the gods and the tireless machinations of Fate. The widening circle of
prosperity grows weaker as it spreads until the antagonistic forces
which it has pushed back are made powerful by compression to resist and
finally overwhelm. So great grew the renown of my skill in medicine that
patients were brought to me from all the four quarters of the globe.
Burdensome invalids whose tardiness in dying was a perpetual grief to
their friends; wealthy testators whose legatees were desirous to come by
their own; superfluous children of penitent parents and dependent
parents of frugal children; wives of husbands ambitious to remarry and
husbands of wives without standing in the courts of divorce--these and
all conceivable classes of the surplus population were conducted to my
dispensary in the City of the Gone Away. They came in incalculable
multitudes.

Government agents brought me caravans of orphans, paupers, lunatics and
all who had become a public charge. My skill in curing orphanism and
pauperism was particularly acknowledged by a grateful parliament.

Naturally, all this promoted the public prosperity, for although I got
the greater part of the money that strangers expended in the city, the
rest went into the channels of trade, and I was myself a liberal
investor, purchaser and employer, and a patron of the arts and sciences.