and fifty dollars and forty cents.
“Now,” said he, “the thousand dollars is exempt by law. What you want to
do is to go and swear this document in and pay tax on the two hundred and
fifty dollars.”
[While he was making this speech his little boy Willie lifted a two-
dollar greenback out of his vest pocket and vanished with it, and I would
wager; anything that if my stranger were to call on that little boy to-
morrow he would make a false return of his income.]
“Do you,” said I, “do you always work up the ‘deductions’ after this
fashion in your own case, sir?”
“Well, I should say so! If it weren’t for those eleven saving clauses
under the head of ‘Deductions’ I should be beggared every year to support
this hateful and wicked, this extortionate and tyrannical government.”
This gentleman stands away up among the very best of the solid men of the
city–the men of moral weight, of commercial integrity, of unimpeachable,
social spotlessness–and so I bowed to his example. I went down to the
revenue office, and under the accusing eyes of my old visitor I stood up
and swore to lie after lie, fraud after fraud, villainy after villainy,
till my soul was coated inches and inches thick with perjury, and my
self-respect gone for ever and ever.
But what of it? It is nothing more than thousands of the richest and
proudest, and most respected, honored, and courted men in America do
every year. And so I don’t care. I am not ashamed. I shall simply,
for the present, talk little and eschew fire-proof gloves, lest I fall
into certain dreadful habits irrevocably.