endurance and pluck. At another time, hearing his landlady say, at
dinner, that an execution was in the house of a sick man with a large
family, at the other end of the town, he left his dinner untouched,
trudged off to the place indicated, and--though the debtor was an utter
stranger to him--paid off the debt and costs in full, without taking
any assignment of the judgment or other security. Then he went quietly
back to his work. From my knowledge of the worthless and impecunious
character of the debtor, I am of opinion that Fink never received a
cent in the way of reimbursement.

In personal appearance he was short and stout. His age, when I first
knew him, must have been somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty-five.
The only peculiarity about his face was an abnormal formation of one of
his front teeth, which protruded, and stuck out almost horizontally.
This, as may be supposed, did not tend to improve an expression of
countenance which in other respects was not very prepossessing. One of
the anvil-strikers happening to allude to him one day in his absence by
the name of "Gagtooth," the felicity of the sobriquet at once commended
itself to the good taste of the other hands in the shop, who thereafter
commonly spoke of him by that name, and eventually it came to be
applied to him by every one in the town.

My acquaintance with him began when I had been in Peoria about a week.
I may premise that I am a physician and surgeon--a graduate of Harvard.
Peoria was at that time a comparatively new place, but it gave promise
of going ahead rapidly; a promise, by the way, which it has since amply
redeemed. Messrs. Gowanlock and Van Duzer's foundry was a pretty
extensive one for a small town in a comparatively new district. They
kept about a hundred and fifty hands employed all the year round, and
during the busy season this number was more than doubled. It was in