Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

--Robert Herrick.




=Tavern Series=


That Smuggled Silk

By THE OLD LOBBYIST


Should your curiosity invite it, and the more since I promised you the
story, we will now, my children, go about the telling of that one
operation in underground silk. It is not calculated to foster the
pride of an old man to plunge into a relation of dubious doings of his
youth. And yet, as I look backward on that one bit of smuggling of
which I was guilty, so far as motive was involved, I exonerate myself.
I looked on the government, because of the South's conquest by the
North, and that later ruin of myself through the machinations of the
Revenue office, as both a political and a personal foe. And I felt,
not alone morally free, but was impelled besides in what I deemed a
spirit of justice to myself, to wage war against it as best I might.
It was on such argument, where the chance proffered, that I sought
wealth as a smuggler. I would deplete the government--forage, as it
were, on the enemy--thereby to fatten my purse. Of course, as my hair