7

180 TRUE RICHES; OR,

 

sary to have a friend outside of the firm. Such
a friend he did not find it very hard to obtain ;
and as nearly the whole burden of the business fell
upon his shoulders, it was not at all difficult to hide
every thing from Jasper.

Confident as Parker was in his great shrewdness,
his speculations outside of the business did not turn
out very favourably. His first essay was im the
purchase of stocks, on which he lost, in a week, two
thousand dollars.

Like the gamester who loses, he only played
deeper, in the hope of recovering his losses; and
as it often happens with the gamester, in similar
ee the deeper he played, the more he
ost.

And so it went on. Sometimes the young man
had aturn of good fortune, and sometimes all the
chances went against him. But he was too far
committed to recede without a discovery. There
was no standing still ; and so newer and bolder ope-
rations were tried, involving larger and larger sums
of money, until the responsibilities of the firm, added
to the large cash drafts made without the cog-
nizance of Jasper, were enormous.

To all such mad schemes the end must come;
and the end came in this instance. Failing to pro-
cure, by outside operations, sufficient money to meet
several large notes, he was forced to divulge a part
of his iniquity to Jasper, in order to save the credit
of the firm. Suspicion of a deeper fraud being
thereby aroused in the mind of his partner, time,
and a sifting investigation of the affairs of the
house, revealed the astounding fact that Parker had