Unable to find employment, and with a character gone, the liberated thief became savage, revengeful, and desperate.  Instead of imputing his fall to his own irregularities, he considered his late unfortunate employer as the cause of his ruin; and now he bent all the energies of his dark nature to destroy the reputation of the man whom he had betrayed and plundered.  Of all the beings self-delivered to the rule of unscrupulous malignity, with whom it has been my fate to come professionally in contact, I never knew one so utterly fiendish as this discomfited pilferer.  Frenzied with his imaginary wrongs, he formed the determination to labor, even if it were for years, to ruin his victim.  Nothing short of death should divert him from this the darling object of his existence.

Animated by these diabolical passions, Cartwright proceeded to his work.  Harvey, he had too good reason to know, was in debt to persons who had made him advances; and by means of artfully-concocted anonymous letters, evidently written by some one conversant with the matters on which he wrote, he succeeded in alarming the haberdasher’s creditors.  The consequences were—­demands of immediate payment, and, in spite of the debtor’s explanations and promises, writs, heavy law expenses, ruinous sacrifices, and ultimate bankruptcy.  It may seem almost too marvelous for belief, but the story of this terrible revenge and its consequences is no fiction.  Every incident in my narrative is true, and the whole may be found in hard outline in the records of the courts with which a few years ago I was familiar.

The humiliated and distressed feelings of Harvey and his family may be left to the imagination.  When he found himself a ruined man, I dare say his mental sufferings were sufficiently acute.  Yet he did not sit down in despair.  To re-establish himself in business in England appeared hopeless; but America presented itself as a scene where industry might find a reward; and by the kindness of some friends, he was enabled to make preparations to emigrate with his wife and children.  Towards the end of February he quitted London for one of the great seaports, where he was to embark for Boston.  On arriving there with his family, Mr. Harvey took up his abode at a principal hotel.  This, in a man of straitened means, was doubtless imprudent; but he afterwards attempted to explain the circumstance by saying, that as the ship in which he had engaged his passage was to sail on the day after his arrival, he had preferred incurring a slight additional expense rather than that his wife—­who was now, with failing spirits, nursing an infant—­should be exposed to coarse associations and personal discomfort.  In the expectation, however, of being only one night in the hotel, Harvey was unfortunately disappointed.  Ship-masters, especially those commanding emigrant vessels, were then, as now, habitual promise-breakers; and although each succeeding sun was to light them on their way, it was fully a fortnight before the ship stood out to sea.  By that time a second and more dire reverse had occurred in the fortunes of the luckless Harvey.