"My good friend," was the bland reply--"my fellow traveler to the bar of
God, it would better comport with your spiritual needs to inquire what
you should do to be saved. But since you ask me, I will confess that
having received what I am compelled to regard as a Providential
intimation, accompanied with the secular means of obedience, I did put
up a small margin and purchase largely of the stock you mention. The
venture, I am constrained to state, was not wholly unprofitable."

Unprofitable? The good man had made a square twenty-five thousand
dollars on that small margin! To conclude--he has it yet.




MR. SWIDDLER'S FLIP-FLAP


Jerome Bowles (said the gentleman called Swiddler) was to be hanged on
Friday, the ninth of November, at five o'clock in the afternoon. This
was to occur at the town of Flatbroke, where he was then in prison.
Jerome was my friend, and naturally I differed with the jury that had
convicted him as to the degree of guilt implied by the conceded fact
that he had shot an Indian without direct provocation. Ever since his
trial I had been endeavoring to influence the Governor of the State to
grant a pardon; but public sentiment was against me, a fact which I
attributed partly to the innate pigheadness of the people, and partly to
the recent establishment of churches and schools which had corrupted the
primitive notions of a frontier community. But I labored hard and
unremittingly by all manner of direct and indirect means during the
whole period in which Jerome lay under sentence of death; and on the