h me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

--Robert Herrick.

=Tavern Series=

That Smuggled Silk

By THE OLD LOBBYIST

Should your curiosity invite it, and the more since I promised you the
story, we will now, my children, go about the telling of that one
operation in underground silk. It is not calculated to foster the
pride of an old man to plunge into a relation of dubious doings of his
youth. And yet, as I look backward on that one bit of smuggling of
which I was guilty, so far as motive was involved, I exonerate myself.
I looked on the government, because of the South's conquest by the
North, and that later ruin of myself through the machinations of the
Revenue office, as both a political and a personal foe. And I felt,
not alone morally free, but was impelled besides in what I deemed a
spirit of justice to myself, to wage war against it as best I might.
It was on such argument, where the chance proffered, that I sought
wealth as a smuggler. I would deplete the government--forage, as it
were, on the enemy--thereby to fatten my purse. Of course, as my hair
has whitened with the sifting frosts of years, I confess that my
sophistries of smuggling seem less and less plausible, while smuggling
itself loses whatever of romantic glamour it may have been invested
with or what little color of respect to which it might seem able to
lay claim.

This tale shall be told in simplest periods. That is as should be; for
expression should ever be meek and subjugated when one's story is the
mere story of a cheat. There is scant room in such recital for heroic
phrase. Smuggling, and paint it with what genius one may, can be
nothing save a skulking, hiding, fear-eaten trade. There is nothing
about it of bravery or dash. How therefore, and avoid laughter, may
one wax stately in any telling of its ignoble details?

When, following my unfortunate crash in tobacco, I had cleared away
the last fragment of the confusion that reigned in my affairs, I was
driven to give my nerves a respite and seek a rest. For three months I
had been under severest stress. When the funeral was done--for funeral
it seemed to me--and my tobacco enterprise and those hopes it had so
flattered were forever laid at rest, my nerves sank exhausted and my
brain was in a whirl. I could neither think with clearness nor plan
with accuracy. Moreover, I was prey to that depression and lack of
confidence in myself, wh