be remarked by those who so frequently met him, in the course of his regular diurnal peregrinations.
"Lame Sam" was not a saint. To watch him upon a Sabbath, when he wended his way to church, for example, while he wandered through the city route, or when he went into the suburbs (as he often did) for a change of air and scene—it might readily have been imagined that the "good old man" entered the sacred edifice to "sit beneath the droppings of the sanctuary," with right good purpose!
But his designs were always pre-eminently selfish, nevertheless. Sam attended church, as he performed other acts in his strange life, with sinister motives. And he rarely did anything without intending, at least, that in the end it should redound to his pecuniary profit. He was secretly an arch rogue, though he was constantly being mistaken for "a good old soul," a sage, a well-to-do countryman, or "any other man "save what he really was—to wit, a shrewd, close-mouthed, wary scamp of the first degree; and the pal, sub rosa, of that notorious counterfeiter, burglar, and safe-blower—Wal' Crosby; of whom we shall write more in detail in another chapter.
Old Sam had "run his rig," for years. He had systematically "shoved the queer" wherever he could find an opening in his journeys, and he was utterly devoid of principle, malgré his good honest looking face; a glance at which would ordinarily impress upon a stranger the idea that butter would scarcely melt in this old fellow's mouth. He had followed his quiet business of passing counterfeit money so long, and with such remarkably good luck, that from his accumulated savings he was able to purchase and pay for a very decent farm in Quakertown, near the Pennsylvania line, which yielded him, for a considerable period, a not indifferent percentage of return for his investment.
