at there are
many rich men in business, whose acts of dishonesty and whose tricks
form a subject of conversation and anecdote with their associates in
trade, yet who are not only tolerated, but are by some actually courted.
Joslin, when quite a young man, had been the assignee of his employer,
who hoped to find in him a pliant tool. He soon found his mistake. He
had put himself completely in the power of his clerk, and the latter
took full advantage of it. The result was, his principal was beggared,
and Joslin rose on his ruins.

It was a favorite practice with Joslin to discover men who were short of
money, lend them what they wanted, and thus, after a while, get control
of all they possessed. When Joslin first met Mr. Burns, he hoped to
entangle him as he had his friend. But the former was too good a
merchant and in too sound a position to be brought in this way into his
toils. He was therefore obliged to have recourse to sheer knavery to
compass his object. The fact of Mr. Burns living so far from the city,
the great expense which would be entailed on him by a litigation, and
the natural repugnance he thought Mr. Burns would have to a lawsuit,
emboldened him to employ the most high-handed measures to cheat him. The
fact was, Mr. Burns's paper had become well known in the market, and
commanded a ready sale. The manufacture was even--the texture firm and
hard. There was a continually increasing demand for it. Joslin
determined on--even for him--some audacious strokes. He sent a lot of
the paper to an obscure auctioneer, one of his tools, and had it bid off
in the name of a young man in his store. He thereupon reported the
entire consignment to be unsalable, and credited Mr. Burns with the
whole lot at the auction prices, less expenses. In this way he claimed
to have no funds when Mr. Burns's drafts became due, and called on the
latter for the ready money. The previous consignment he pretended to
have sold in the city, at a time when paper was much lower than usual,
but he had returned for this the then market price. Really he had not
sold the paper at all. Knowing it was about to rise, he simply reported
a sale, and kept the paper on hand to take advantage of the market, and
he was now selling it at an advance of ten per cent, on the previous
rates.

Mr. Burns had never before encountered so desperate a knave. As we have
said, the affair troubled him greatly. True, he was determined to
investigate it thoroughly, but