der ways as he talked thus
with the ablest of his fellow professionals.

The fellow professionals cited cases. There was Rosenthal, a noted
receiver in his day, to whom a dishonest clerk had sold five thousand
pounds for five hundred. Rosenthal had held the notes for six years, and
had then put them cautiously on the Continental market. He was an old
hand, was Rosenthal, and very clever and leary, but they had bowled him
out. The clerk was wanted on another charge, and turned Queen's
evidence against the receiver. Almost all the stories had this kind of
termination, because the legal gentlemen whom young Mr. Barter consulted
remembered mainly cases in which they or their friends had been engaged,
or cases which had resulted in criminal proceedings. Others there
certainly were, but they were vague and necessarily without those
guiding particulars which he desired.

It has been already hinted that the young man was a gambler, and it is
likely that most of the reasons which made the money seem so welcome to
him had their sources at the gaming table. He belonged to one of those
clubs which deserve to be numbered among the blessings of
modern society--where men do not meet for social intercourse and
good-fellowship, or for dining purposes, or for any of the common and
amiable reasons which draw men into club-life, but simply and purely
to the end that they may win one another's money. It was a joint-stock
swindling company to which young Mr. Barter belonged, and within its
limits every man proposed to himself to get the better of every other
man by such means as lay in his power. A pigeon got in amongst them
every now and then, of course--came in well-feathered and went out
plucked, but for the main part the rooks pecked hungrily at one another,
and made but little of their time and pains. The one solitary advantage
of these corporations is that they gather the depredatory birds
together, and lead them to prey upon themselves instead of wandering
abroad for the defeathering of the innocent and artless who abound
even in these days. The well-constituted mind can hardly fail to take
pleasure in the contemplation of these resorts, where Greek meets Greek
(in the modern French sense as well as the old heroic)--where scoundrel
encounters scoundrel, and learns that the pleasure of being cheated is
by no means so great as that of cheating.

There were people of widely ranging social position in this curious
contingent. One or tw