"Let me die to sweet music."--J.W. Shuckers.

"Go forth, Clarence Stanley! Hence to the bleak world, dog! You
have repaid my generosity with the blackest ingratitude. You
have forged my name on a five thousand dollar check--have
repeatedly robbed my money drawer--have perpetrated a long series
of high-handed villanies, and now to-night, because, forsooth,
I'll not give you more money to spend on your dissolute
companions, you break a chair over my aged head. Anyway! You
are a young man of small moral principle. Don't ever speak to me
again!"

These harsh words fell from the lips of Horace Blinker, one of
the merchant princes of New York City. He spoke to Clarence
Stanley, his adopted son and a beautiful youth of nineteen
summers. In vain did Clarence plead his poverty, his tender age,
his inexperience; in vain did he fasten those lustrous blue eyes
of his appealingly and tearfully upon Mr. Blinker, and tell him
he would make the pecuniary matter all right in the fall, and
that he merely shattered a chair over his head by way of a joke.
The stony-hearted man was remorseless, and that night Clarence
Stanly became a wanderer in the wide, wide world. As he went
forth he uttered these words: "H. Blinker, beware! A RED HAND
is around, my fine feller!"

CHAPTER. II.

"--a man of strange wild mien--one who has seen trouble."--Sir
Walter Scott.