case, or in the manner or appearance of the applicant for a bill of exchange, to excite the least attention. But he must have been insensible indeed who was not attracted by the strange aspect and appearance of a regular visitor at the bank in Chambers' Street. So surely as the festivals of Christmas and Easter were approaching, would a man of powerful frame, wild eyes, and dissipated appearance, enter the office, and laying on the counter $15, or $20, ask for an order in favour of an old man away in some country village in Ireland. Not unfrequently would the clothes of the Society's customer bear the marks of abject poverty, and his face evidences of the roughest usage; and were the police asked to give a character of this poor fellow, they would say that; though honest and free from crime, there was not 'a harder case' in New York; and that there were few better known in the Tombs than he was. True, he was a hard case indeed, wasting his strength and energy in folly and dissipation, working now and then as a longshore man, but spending what he earned in drink, and only sober when in prison, paying the penalty of drunkenness or violence, or at the two fixed periods of the year—some time before Christmas and some time before Easter. While in prison his sobriety was involuntary—at these periods it was voluntary and deliberate. His old father in Ireland expected to hear from 'his boy' and the letter so anxiously looked for at home should not be empty. So long then as it was necessary to work in order to send a couple of pounds as a Christmas-box or an Easter gift, he would do so, and remain sober during that time; but once the money was sent, and the sacred duty discharged, he would go back to the old course, spending his days partly at work, partly in rows and dissipation, and very constantly in the Tombs, possibly repenting his wanton waste of life. There was no one to tell the old man at home of the wild desperate course of his 'boy' in America, and he never knew with what heroic self-denial these welcome re-
