ct the particular sort of good-for-nothingness which suits his
tastes; but my lot is less satisfactory. I have been, through the
pressure of rascalities invented by others, driven into a way of life
which is as much like highway robbery as one hair is to another.

"Like a rock in an avalanche, I, pressed on all sides, have got frozen
into the midst of the most frightful speculations ever devised by a
usurer's brain. My departed uncle was good enough to make me heir to his
favorite branch of business--land speculations.

"I put off involving myself with its details as long as I could, and
left the charge of that part of my inheritance to Westlock. As this was
cowardly, I found an excuse for it in the quantity of work the
money-matters of the deceased afforded me. At last there was no help for
it; I had to undertake the responsibility. And if before I had had a
pretty good guess at the elasticity of whatever it was that served my
uncle instead of a conscience, it now became beyond a doubt that the
purpose of his will and testament was to punish my juvenile offenses
against him by making me a companion of old weather-beaten villains,
whose cunning was such that Satan himself would have had to put his tail
into his pocket, and become chimney-sweep in order to escape them.

"This letter is written from a new town in Tennessee, a cheerful
place--no better, though, for being built on speculation with my money:
a few wooden cottages, half of them taverns, filled to the roof with a
dirty and outcast emigrant rabble, half of whom are lying ill with
putrid fever.

"Those who are still moving about are a hollow-eyed, anxious-looking
set, all candidates for death. Daily, when the poor wretches look at the
rising sun, or are unreasonable enough to feel a want of something to
eat and drink--daily, from morn to eve, their favorite occupation is to
curse the land-shark who took their money from them for transport, land,
and improvements, and brought them into this district, which is under
water two months in the year, and for the ten others more like a tough
kind of pap than any thing else. Now the men who have pointed out to
them this dirty way into heaven are no other than my agents and
colleagues, so that I, Fritz Fink, am the lucky man upon whom every
imprecation there is in German and Irish falls all the day long. I send
off all who are able to walk about, and have to feed the inhabitants of
my hospital with Indian corn and Peru