I studied it attentively for four minutes.

I then called up the cook, and said: "Hold me while I faint! Let Marie turn the griddle-cakes." By and by, when I came to, I sent down to the rum-mill on the corner and hired an artist by the week to sit up nights and curse that stranger, and give me a lift occasionally in the daytime when I came to a hard place.
Ah, what a miscreant he was! His "advertisement" was nothing in the world but a wicked tax-return--a string of impertinent questions about my private affairs, occupying the best part of four foolscap pages of fine print--questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn't understand what the most of them were driving at--questions, too, that were calculated to make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing to a falsehood.

I looked for a loophole, but there did not appear to be any.

Inquiry No.

1 covered my case as generously and as amply as an umbrella could cover an ant-hill: What were your profits, during the past year, from any trade, business, or vocation, wherever carried on?
And that inquiry was backed up by thirteen others of an equally searching nature, the most modest of which required information as to whether I had committed any burglary or highway robbery, or, by any arson or other secret source of emolument had acquired property which was not enumerated in my statement of income as set opposite to inquiry No.