How certain it is, that once the downward step is taken, the rest follows swiftly and inevitably, and ruin and disgrace tread swiftly and surely upon the heels of folly and crime.  Newton Edwards began life under the brightest aspects.  Of respectable parentage, he had enjoyed the benefits of a liberal education, and his first essay in business had been both fortunate and profitable.  Beloved by his family, and admired by a numerous circle of friends, he deliberately gave himself up to a life of excess and dissipation, and the end was soon to be a dark and gloomy prison.

I will, however, leave him to tell his own story, and the moral of it is so plain that he who runs may read.  We were all seated around the fallen young man awaiting his recital, and after a few moments of hesitation and embarrassment he began: 

“I will tell you all there is to relate, and in order that you may fully understand my present situation, I will commence with the first temptations, which finally led to the commission of this crime.”

“Yes,” said William, encouragingly, “tell us all.”

“The robbery of the Geneva bank was planned more than six months ago,” continued Edwards, “but its real origin dates back more than a year.  At that time I was traveling for a large house in the city, and was receiving a liberal salary.  I had a large trade, and my employers were very generous with me.  I cannot tell you how I drifted into habits of dissipation, but it was not very long before I found it a very easy matter to dispose of my salary almost as soon as received, and was forced to borrow money of my friends to enable me to maintain myself at all.  From that I was tempted to gamble, and being fortunate at the outset, I soon found, as I imagined, an easy way to make money without serious labor; but I speedily discovered that my first success was doomed to be of short life, and I began to lose more money than I had ever won.  It was after one of my losing experiences at the gaming-table, and when I was hard pressed for money to meet my immediate wants, that I visited Geneva, for the purpose of selling goods to some of my customers in that place.  At that time I made the acquaintance of a young man by the name of Horace Johnson, who was a practicing dentist of that town.  Like myself, he was a wild and reckless fellow, given to dissipation and drink, and who, like myself, had been able to conceal the fact from his family and their friends.  Johnson’s prevailing vice was an uncontrollable passion for gambling, and he had been addicted to this practice for a long time.  I afterward understood that he had acquired this habit while attending a dental college in St. Louis, where he had become quite an expert in the handling of cards, and was well posted in the tricks so frequently resorted to by gamblers to fleece their unsuspecting victims.  When he returned from college and established his business in his native town, he became the leader of a set of fast young men, and his office was the nightly resort of his associates, where they played and gambled frequently, until the morning hours drove them to their homes.