gone to make trial of the Spaniards on the lower Mississippi. It was quite true. Wishing to enforce his plans by an object lesson, he collected a valuable cargo, and dropped down the river. His success was greater than he dared hope for. Elated, he returned in great state, in a "chariot" drawn by four horses and accompanied by a retinue of slaves. Here, indeed, was a transformation. He had departed a bankrupt trader, be returned like a merchant prince. Nor was it all empty show, a display on the borrowed money of too trusting friends, as it had been more than hinted that his previous little show had been. He displayed with a flourish of trumpets a commercial treaty with the Spanish authorities at New Orleans, conferring on him the right to export thither all the "productions" of Kentucky free of duty, and offering, on behalf of the Spanish government, nine dollars and fifty cents per hundredweight for tobacco, which had hitherto been sold at two dollars. Here, indeed, was a solid triumph, one that scarcely any one would refuse to share.
Despite the glitter of the gold and the jingle of the dollars there was no lack of men to ask the meaning of this transaction, and why it was that while the representatives of Spain in one place refused on any conditions to open the Mississippi to trade, in another place others, on behalf of that country, entered into private treaty for the benefit of a single State. The charge was easily suggested and instantly made, that Wilkinson had been bribed by the Spanish government to favor the cause of
