I have been, through the pressure of rascalities invented by others, driven into a way of life which is as much like highway robbery as one hair is to another.
"Like a rock in an avalanche, I, pressed on all sides, have got frozen into the midst of the most frightful speculations ever devised by a usurer's brain.

My departed uncle was good enough to make me heir to his favorite branch of business--land speculations.
"I put off involving myself with its details as long as I could, and left the charge of that part of my inheritance to Westlock.

As this was cowardly, I found an excuse for it in the quantity of work the money-matters of the deceased afforded me.

At last there was no help for it; I had to undertake the responsibility.

And if before I had had a pretty good guess at the elasticity of whatever it was that served my uncle instead of a conscience, it now became beyond a doubt that the purpose of his will and testament was to punish my juvenile offenses against him by making me a companion of old weather-beaten villains, whose cunning was such that Satan himself would have had to put his tail into his pocket, and become chimney-sweep in order to escape them.
"This letter is written from a new town in Tennessee, a cheerful place--no better, though, for being built on speculation with my money: a few wooden cottages, half of them taverns, filled to the roof with a dirty and outcast emigrant rabble, half of whom are lying ill with putrid fever.
"Those who are still moving about are a hollow-eyed, anxious-looking set, all candidates for death.