ust, he would undertake to
furnish them at an easier rate, in conjunction with some of the leading
men in Virginia and Maryland, with whom, he said, he had already
concerted measures for that purpose.

"The company were so much alarmed at these insinuations, that they
declined complying with Mr. M--'s demands until the abbe's return; and,
though they afterwards used all their endeavours to persuade him to be
concerned with that little traitor in his undertaking, by which he
might still have been a very considerable gainer, he resisted all their
solicitations, and plainly told them, in the abbe's presence, that
he would never prostitute his own principles so far, as to enter into
engagements of any kind with a person of his character, much less in a
scheme that had a manifest tendency to lower the market price of tobacco
in England.

"Thus ended a project the most extensive, simple, and easy, and, as
appeared by the trial made, the best calculated to raise an immense
fortune of any that was ever undertaken or planned by a private person;
a project, in the execution of which M-- had the good of the public, and
the glory of putting in a flourishing condition the valuable branch of
our trade which gives employment to two great provinces and above two
hundred sail of ships, much more at heart than his own private interest.
It was reasonable to expect, that a man whose debts M-- had paid more
than once, whom he had obliged in many other respects, and whom he had
carried with him at a very considerable expense, on this expedition,
merely with a view of bettering his fortune, would have acted with
common honesty, if not with gratitude; but such was the depravity
of this little monster's heart, that, on his deathbed, he left a
considerable fortune to mere strangers, with whom he had little or no
connection, without the least thought of refunding the money advanced
for him by M--, in order to prevent his rotting in a jail.

"When M-- had once obtained a command of money, he, by his knowledge
in several branches of trade, as well as by the assistance of some
intelligent friends at Paris and London, found means to employ it to
very good purpose; and had he been a man of that selfish disposition,
which too much prevails in the world, he might have been at this day
master of a very ample fortune; but his ear was never deaf to the voice
of distress, nor his beneficent heart shut against the calamities of his
fellow-creatures. He wa