s he was the father of
three children.

James Harvey's establishment was one of the best frequented of its class
in the street. You could never pass without seeing customers going in or
out. There was evidently not a little business going forward. But
although, to all appearance, a flourishing concern, the proprietor of the
establishment was surprised to find that he was continually pinched in
his circumstances. No matter what was the amount of business transacted
over the counter, he never got any richer.

At the period referred to, shop-keeping had not attained that degree
of organization, with respect to counter-men and cashiers, which now
distinguishes the great houses of trade. The primitive till was not
yet superseded. This was the weak point in Harvey's arrangements; and
not to make a needless number of words about it, the poor man was
regularly robbed by a shopman, whose dexterity in pitching a guinea
into the drawer, so as to make it jump, unseen, with a jerk into his
hand, was worthy of Herr Dobler, or any other master of the sublime
art of jugglery.

Good-natured and unsuspicious, perhaps also not sufficiently vigilant,
Harvey was long in discovering how he was pillaged. Cartwright, the name
of the person who was preying on his employer, was not a young man. He
was between forty and fifty years of age, and had been in various
situations, where he had always given satisfaction, except on the score
of being somewhat gay and somewhat irritable. Privately, he was a man of
loose habits, and for years his extravagances had been paid for by
property clandestinely abstracted from his too-confiding master. Slow to
believe in the reality of such wickedness, Mr. Harvey could with
difficulty entertain the suspicions which began to dawn on his mind. At
length all doubt was at an end. He detected Cartwright in the very act of
carrying off goods to a considerable amount. The man was tried at the Old
Bailey for the offence; but through a technical informality in the
indictment, acquitted.

Unable to find employment, and with a character gone, the liberated thief
became savage, revengeful, and desperate. Instead of imputing his fall to
his own irregularities, he considered his late unfortunate employer as
the cause of his ruin; and now he bent all the energies of his dark
nature to destroy the reputation of the man whom he had betrayed and
plundered. Of all the beings self-delivered to the rule of unscrupulous
malignity,