Country-seat terraced and arbored and parterred clear to the water’s brink.  Horses enough to stock a king’s equerry.  Grooms and postilions in full rig.  Wine cellars enough to make a whole legislature drunk.  New York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket.  He winked, and men in high place fell.  He lifted his little finger, and ignoramuses took important office.  He whispered, and in Albany and Washington they said it thundered.  Wider and mightier and more baleful his influence, until it seemed as if Pandemonium was to be adjourned to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should have a successful competitor.

To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man.  Diamonds as large as hickory nuts.  A pin of sixty diamonds representing sheaves of wheat.  Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden by a great harp of flowers.  Ships of flowers.  Forty silver sets, one of them with two hundred and forty pieces.  One wedding-dress that cost five thousand dollars.  A famous libertine, who owned several Long Island Sound steamboats, and not long before he was shot for his crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver iceberg, with representations of arctic bears walking on icicle-handles and ascending the spoons.  Was there ever such a convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-a-brac, of grandeurs, social grandeurs?  The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high.  But just at that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentered on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the American bar, Charles O’Connor, got on the track of the offender.  First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years’ imprisonment under twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, then a lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart in a prison cell.  God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the world saw as never before that “the way of the transgressor is hard,” and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you had better be an honest chairmaker with a day’s wages at a time than a brilliant commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed with plunder.

What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings, snatching the crown of England and setting it on his own brow, destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to his obesity.  Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry hoof.  Nations horror-struck.  But one day while at the apex of all observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown before the breath has left his father’s body.