And yet, among some classes in the south there exists a religious sentiment apparently grateful; but what credit for sincerity shall we accord to it when the result proves that no part of the organisation itself works for the elevation of a degraded class?  How much this is to be regretted we leave to the reader’s discrimination.  The want of a greater effort to make religious influence predominant has been, and yet is, a source of great evil.  But let us continue our narrative, and beg the reader’s indulgence for having thus transgressed.

Flattered and caressed among gay assemblages, Lorenzo soon found himself drawn beyond their social pleasantries into deeper and more alluring excitements.  His frequent visits at the saloon and gambling-tables did not detract, for a time, from the social position society had conferred upon him.

His parents, instead of restraining, fostered these associations, prided themselves on his reception, providing means of maintaining him in this style of living.  Vanity and passion led him captive in their gratifications; they were inseparable from the whirlpool of confused society that triumphs at the south,—­that leads the proud heart writhing in the agony of its follies.  He cast himself upon this, like a frail thing upon a rapid stream, and—­forgetting the voyage was short—­found his pleasures soon ended in the troubled waters of misery and disgrace.

There is no fundamental morality in the south, nor is education invested with the material qualities of social good; in this it differs from the north, against which it is fast building up a political and social organisation totally at variance.  Instead of maintaining those great principles upon which the true foundation of the republic stands, the south allows itself to run into a hyper-aristocratic vagueness, coupled with an arbitrary determination to perpetuate its follies for the guidance of the whole Union.  And the effect of this becomes still more dangerous, when it is attempted to carry it out under the name of democracy,—­American democracy!  In this manner it serves the despotic ends of European despots:  they point to the freest government in the world for examples of their own absolutism, shield their autocracy beneath its democracy, and with it annihilate the rights of the commoner.

Heedlessly wending his way, the man of rank and station at one side, the courtesan with his bland smiles at the other, Lorenzo had not seen the black poniard that was to cut the cord of his downfall,—­it had remained gilded.  He drank copious draughts at the house of licentiousness, became infatuated with the soft music that leads the way of the unwary, until at length, he, unconsciously at it were, found himself in the midst of a clan who are forming a plot to put the black seal upon his dishonour.  Monto Graspum, his money playing through the hands of his minions in the gambling rooms, had professed to be his friend.  He had watched his pliable nature,