of it came immediately to California and was married. This true tale, with variations, might apply to thousands of marriages during the fast flush times.
In the town of Marysville, in 1853, there lived a man of virtues invisible, but of faults palpable and too apparent. His reputation for honesty, like his form, was lean and anovular. He would steal so skillfullv, holding in his hands the spoils and peering meanwhile at his victim through the meshes of the law with such consummate cunning that one could do no less than beat him now and then. But such chastisements seemed rather to refresh him than otherwise. He felt all the while that he deserved so much worse at the hands of his fellows than they could give him, that even in his punishments he enjoyed the inestimable privilege of cheating them.
Fortune smiled on skill and industry, and under real estate manipulations, shaving short paper by turning it down one half, and loaning money on good security at ten per cent a month, and managing so as to get all his interest, a portion of his principal, and then cheating the lender out of the collateral pledged, his capital grew rapidly.
But happily for humanity the inevitable laws of traffic preclude the possibility of the eternal success of villainy ; otherwise our Napoleon of finance would, ere this, have been the happy owner of all Marysville. Up to this time he had reigned rascal supreme, but now waves of trouble rolled over him, and a horrible incubus settled upon his affairs in the form of two lately-arrived lawyers, keen wiry fellows, hungrier and sharper than himself
These two briefless sharks rented an office of our financier^ the rent after the first quarter to be paid quarterly in advance. Promptly at the expiration of the first three months the cadaverous visage of the landlord, lengthened by the thought of the half year s rent now due, appeared in the lawyer's office, appeared
