he was tempted to exceed in his borrowed money account the sum
received as his quarterly dues. This made it impossible for him to
pay off, when he received his instalments of salary, the whole
amount of borrowed money, and caused him to cast about for some new
resource. In balancing the cash account one day,--he had charge of
this,--he found that there was an error of one hundred dollars in
favor of cash--that is, there were on hand one hundred dollars more
than was called for by the account. He went over the account again
and again, but could not discover the error. For more than an hour
he examined the various entries and additions, but with no better
success. At last, however, a little to his disappointment, for he
had already began to think of quietly appropriating the surplus, he
found the error to consist in the carriage of tens--four instead of
five having been carried to the third or column of hundreds on one
of the pages of the cash book, thus making the amount called for in
the book one hundred dollars less than the real sum on hand.

For some time after this discovery, Sanford sat at his desk in a
state of abstraction and irresolution. He was vexed that the error
had been found out, for he had already nearly made up his mind to
keep the overplus and say nothing about it. He did not attempt to
change the erroneous figure.--Why should it not remain so?--he at
length asked himself. If it had cost him so much time and labor to
find it out, it was not probable that any one else would detect it.
Indeed, no one but himself and Mr. Millard had any thing to do with
the general cash account of the establishment, and he knew very well
that the latter did not examine it with a very close scrutiny.
Finally, pressing demands for money determined him to put the
surplus into his pocket, at least for the present. He did so, and in
that act let into his mind a flood of evil counsellors, whose