isement" was nothing in the
world but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about
my private affairs, occupying the best part of four fools-cap pages of
fine print-questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous
ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the
most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to
make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from
swearing to a falsehood. I looked for a loophole, but there did not
appear to be any. Inquiry No. 1 covered my case as generously and as
amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill:

What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade,
business, or vocation, wherever carried on?

And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching
nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had
committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other
secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated
in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No. 1.

It was plain that that stranger had enabled me to make a goose of myself.
It was very, very plain; and so I went out and hired another artist.
By working on my vanity, the stranger had seduced me into declaring an
income of two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars. By law, one
thousand dollars of this was exempt from income tax--the only relief I
could see, and it was only a drop in the ocean. At the legal five per
cent., I must pay to the government the sum of ten thousand six hundred
and fifty dollars, income tax!

[I may remark, in this place, that I did not do it.]

I am acquainted with a very opulent man, whose house is a palace, whose
table is regal, whose outlays are enormous, yet a man who has no income,
as I have often noticed by the revenue returns; and to him I went for
advice in my distress. He took my dreadful exhibition of receipts, he
put on his glasses, he took his pen, and presto!--I was a pauper! It was
the neatest thing that ever was. He did it simply by deftly manipulating
the bill of "DEDUCTIONS." He set down my "State, national, and municipal
taxes" at so much; my "losses by shipwreck; fire, etc.," at so much; my
"losses on sales of real estate"--on "live stock sold"--on "payments for
rent of homestead"--on "repairs, improvements, interest"--on "previously
taxed salary as an officer of the United States army,