On the last night of 1836, in the hard winter of a business slump, a poor New York couple find a baby girl left at their door with an envelope of money. Little Ida grows up as their own until a stranger comes looking for her, and she is spirited away to Philadelphia by a woman who passes bad coins for a living.
One of Alger’s earliest novels, mixing his rags-to-respectability creed with kidnapping and counterfeiting melodrama. Download the free EPUB.