hington they said it thundered. Wider and mightier and more baleful
his influence, until it seemed as if Pandemonium was to be adjourned
to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of
administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should
have a successful competitor.

To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man.
Diamonds as large as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds
representing sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden
by a great harp of flowers. Ships of flowers. Forty silver sets, one
of them with two hundred and forty pieces. One wedding-dress that cost
five thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned several Long
Island Sound steamboats, and not long before he was shot for his
crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver
iceberg, with representations of arctic bears walking on
icicle-handles and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such a
convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-a-brac, of grandeurs, social
grandeurs? The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that
house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high. But just at
that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentered
on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the
American bar, Charles O'Connor, got on the track of the offender.
First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years' imprisonment under
twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, then a
lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in
Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back
under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart
in a prison cell. God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the
world saw as never before that "the way of the transgressor is hard,"
and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you
had better be an honest chairmaker with a day's wages at a time than
a brilliant commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed
with plunder.

What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the
intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings,
snatching the crown of England and setting it on his own brow,
destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making
a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic
espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regar