Suffice it to say, that the _swindlee_, if I
may be allowed the royalty of coining a word, at once freed his own
mind and imprisoned the body of M. M. ----; for in those days
imprisonment for debt was a recognized institution, and I think few
of its strongest opponents will deny that this was a case to which
it was no abuse to apply it.
IV.
I regret that I am compelled to leave this exemplary merchant in
captivity; but the exigencies of my story, the moral of which
beckons me away to the distant coast of Mexico, require it at my
hands. The reader may be consoled, however, by the knowledge that he
obtained his liberation in due time, his Dutch creditor being
entirely satisfied that nothing whatsoever could be squeezed out of
him by passing him between the bars of the debtor's prison, though
that was all the satisfaction he ever did get. How he accompanied his
young wife to Europe and there lived by the coining of her voice
into drachmas, as her father had done before him, needs not to be
told here; nor yet how she was divorced from him, and made another
matrimonial venture in partnership with De B----. I have nothing to
do with him or her, after the bargain and sale of which she was the
object, and the consequences which immediately resulted from it; and
here, accordingly, I take my leave of them.
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