I was about a year getting it together, and to me it was a fortune.

I'm a shoemaker by occupation, and lived in a town in Massachusetts, where I have a wife and two young children.

I left them a year ago to go to the mines.

I did well, and the money I told you about would have made us all comfortable, if I could only have got it home." "Were you robbed of it ?" asked Joe, remembering his own experience.
"Yes; I was robbed of it, but not in the way you are thinking of.

A wily scoundrel induced me to enter a gambling-den, the Bella Union, they call it.