you might even attend your own funeral! It's not the first
time that sort of thing has bin done. So, then, you'll have your life
insured, but not yet. Your first business is to set about the purchase
of the stock, and, let me tell you, there's no time to lose, so I advise
you to write out the orders this very night. I'll fetch you fifty
pounds in a day or two, and you'll pay up at once. It'll look well, you
know, and after it's all settled we'll divide the plunder. Now then,
good-night. I congratulate you on your thriving business."

Gorman opened the door of the inner room as he said the last words, so
that the lad in the shop might hear them. As he passed through the shop
he whispered in his friend's ear, "Mind the consequences if you fail,"
and then left him with another hearty good-night.

Poor David Boone, having sold himself to the tempter, went about his
duties like an abject slave. He began by ordering goods from various
wholesale dealers in the city, after which he took occasion to stand a
good deal at his shop door and accost such of his neighbours as chanced
to pass. The conversation at such times invariably began with the
interesting topic of the weather, on which abstruse subject Boone and
his friends displayed a surprising profundity of knowledge, by stating
not only what the weather was at the time being, and what it had been in
time past, but what it was likely to be in time to come. It soon
diverged, however, to business, and usually ended in a display of fresh
goods and invoices, and in references, on the part of Boone, to the
felicitous state of trade at the time.

Do what he would, however, this thriving tradesman could not act his
part well. In the midst of his prosperity his smiles were ghastly and
his laughter was sardonic. Even when commenting on the prosperity of
trade his sighs were frequent and deep. One of his friends thought and
said that prosperity was turning the poor man's brain. Others thought
that he was becoming quite unnatural and unaccountable in his
deportment; and a few, acting on the principle of the sailor's parrot,
which "could not speak much, but was a tremendous thinker," gave no
outward indication of their thoughts beyond wise looks and grave shakes
of the head, by which most people understood them to signify that they
feared there was a screw loose somewhere.

This latter sentiment, it will be observed, is a very common one among
the unusually wise ones of