At this period his father placed him in the counting-room of a wealthy mercantile house in the city of New-York. Here his good education and natural quickness soon procured him the favorable notice of his employers, while his constant and active duties seemed to have smothered, at least for a time, his malicious temper. Before the expiration of a year he had acquired the good will and confidence of the merchants whom he served; but by this time the pleasures and temptations of the "Commercial Emporium" had begun to attract his inexperienced eyes, and his disposition seemed to have taken a new turn.
With all the stubborn wilfulness and unfeeling carelessness of consequences that characterized his temper, he plunged into all manner of vicious indulgences; but what seemed to attract him the most irresistibly, and fix him the most firmly, was a fondness for gambling. The "time-honored" black-legs of the billiard and roulette tables were, however, an overmatch for an inexperienced lad of nineteen, and, as might have been expected, he was soon stripped, thoroughly "cleaned out." It was then that the idea of replenishing his pockets from the counting-room trunk first presented itself to his mind, and, without much hesitation or compunction of conscience, he took small sums from time to time.
It is needless to trace his progress more minutely--he finished by forging a check for a thousand dollars, which forgery was subsequently detected.
Precisely the same "dull round" of vice is trodden, at least once a week, by the same class of young men. The merchants' clerks are certainly creatures of no imagination, or they would have struck out some new way of going to the devil; they evidently have not a spark of what an eminent Irish lawyer called "the poetry of wickedness;" they uniformly begin with plundering the money drawer, and end with forging checks.
Mr. Longford was advised of his son's guilt, and the affair was compromised by his paying the amount purloined. In utter despair the afflicted father placed his degenerate son on board an outward-bound Indiaman, a mode of proceeding often resorted to prematurely, for it generally does a boy's business if he is viciously inclined--a merchantman's forecastle is not a school of morality. Sending a refractory child to sea may be an excellent way of getting rid of him, but it is at the same time the most expeditious mode of sending him to the devil.