Sometimes, I am told, these securities paid interest for a year or so, and the suckers got their friends in while there were a few left--bonds, I mean--there are always suckers.
Like other egoists, our client became careless as time went on and one day took it upon himself to issue a few hundred bonds in a company without holding a directors' meeting.

He should not be severely blamed for neglecting a detail of this sort when he was so well aware of its purely formal if not farcical character.
Still, it was one of those little slips that even the most careful of us will sometimes make, and the district-attorney took an underhand advantage of our friend and indicted him for forging the names of the officers of the company to an unauthorized issue of bonds.

Gottlieb and I had, perforce, to defend him; but, unfortunately, his real defence would have been even worse than the charge.

He could not say that there was no real company and that there were no such human beings as the persons whose names he had written across the back of the bonds in question.
Poor fellow! He was an absolutely innocent man.

Yet he went to Sing Sing for seven years for committing no crime at all.