" Some individuals in England have reproached me with
indulging too much in building castles in the air; but certainly,
compared to those of a Yankee in search after wealth, mine have been
most sober speculations.
Each of our new companions had some little Texan history to relate,
which they declared to be the most rascally, but _smartish_ trick in the
world. One of the lawyers was once summoned before a magistrate, and a
false New Orleans fifty-dollar bank-note was presented to him, as the
identical one he had given to the clerk of Tremont House (the great
hotel at Galveston), in payment of his weekly bill. Now, the lawyer had
often dreamed of fifties, hundreds, and even of thousands; but fortune
had been so fickle with him, that he had never been in possession of
bank-notes higher than five or ten dollars, except one of the glorious
Cairo Bank twenty-dollar notes, which his father presented to him in
Baltimore, when he advised him most paternally to try his luck in
the West.
By the bye, that twenty-dollar Cairo note's adventures should be written
in gold letters, for it enabled the traveller to eat, sleep, and drink,
free of cost, from Louisville to St. Louis, through Indiana and
Illinois; any tavern-keeper preferring losing the price of a bed, or of
a meal, sooner than run the risk of returning good change for bad money.
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