Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/36

 1835 he went back to Ohio, took up the tanning business there, bought wool, raised fancy live-stock, including racehorses, speculated very indiscreetly in land, indorsed a note for a friend, failed disastrously, and in his bankruptcy attempted, in pursuance of a lawyer's advice, to hold a farm against which there was an attachment, and was arrested on a peace warrant and taken to Akron jail; but the key does not appear actually to have been turned on him. He had pledged for his own benefit some twenty-eight hundred dollars put in his hands by the New England Woollen Company for the purchase of wool; but this he made no secret of, and was not troubled on account of it by the company, which still trusted him. He was all the rest of his life—and more, for he left fifty dollars for the purpose in his will—in paying up this debt. His friends and business men in general went on trusting him with large amounts of