is tail dropped off."
Weary of the growing distrust they saw, after my remittances began to
fall off, and heartily sick of the Gerrymandering about them, of the
usurers and money-changers and Shylocks, who were bleeding them to
death, by lending them money upon pledges of merchandise, the two elder
partners, Pierpont and Lord, lost no time in following their junior. He
had opened on South Calvert Street; they took the whole of a large
building opposite, opened below their wholesale business, and after a
few months went to housekeeping overhead, both families living together.
Then, to get rid of our stock, Mr. Pierpont went off to Charleston,
S.C., where he had served his time as a tutor, and there set up a retail
establishment, under the charge of a former clerk in their service, and
of another man, a heartless vagabond, whom they had happened to get
acquainted with at a boarding-house on their first arrival, and took a
fancy to, nobody ever knew why. He was an Englishman, had probably been
upon the stage, and lived from hand to mouth, nobody knew how, until we
took him _up_, and he took us _in_ most pitiably.

After a brief struggle, and the establishment of another retail store in
Calvert Street, which I took charge of, with what there was left of the
Charleston adventure, we failed outright, and all this within six or
eight months after we had called our creditors together and obtained an
extension of twelve months and testimonials in our favor of the most
gratifying character, and within little more than a year after leaving
Boston.

And then, for want of anything better to do, I began writing for the
papers, for the "Portico," and at last for the public, as an editor and
as an author, mainly at the instigation of Mr. Pierpont, for whom I
wrote both "Niagara"[1] and "Guldau," and a part of "Allen's" American
Revolution, studying law, and languages by the half-dozen at the same
time, and laboring upon the average about sixteen hours a day, while Mr.
Pierpont struck out boldly for a far-off perilous and rocky shore, with
a lighthouse, in the shape of a pulpit, before him, and achieved the
"Airs of Palestine" while undergoing the process of regeneration, and
starving by inches upon what there were left of his wife's teaspoons,
which were sold one by one to pay the rent of a cheap room in Howard
Street. So poor indeed were we at one time, that we could hardly muster
enough between us to pay our bootblack.

I have alr