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page number 5 The subjects of all my sketches were veritable characters, and the incidents related facts, colored just sufficient to make them palatable to the class of readers for whom they were intended. While I wrote to amuse, however, I endeavoured to point a moral, and for this reason, and also because they serve to show the bent of my mind at the time in contrast to what it is now, and thus magnify to a greater degree the grace of God, which in these latter days has brought me out of nature's darkness into the marvelous light of the Gospel, (for this reason I say) I feel justified in placing them on record with the rest of my life's experience. The following sketch, not only shows the "Ruling Passion strong in Death," but the folly and wickedness of giving all up for the things which perish. Elkanah Dutson was of the tall, lean and lank order of beauty. His features and his corporosity, his limbs and his joints, were all angles; and his business tact was as sharp as his features. Imagine a man with a nose forming a perfect right angle triangle with the surface of his face, and set between two small sparkling gray eyes, the likes of which gradually converge ‘till they met in a point just above a very prominent pointed cheek bone; and a mouth that cannot be described by words; and