great storm that had been his undoing. With his eyes still resting on the map, he recurred to his early school days and to his four years at Harvard. There was a burden of heartache in these recollections. Incidents of the unconscious brutality of playmates came back to him,—the cruel candor with which they had rejected him from sports in which proficiency, and not mere strength or zeal, was essential. He had enjoyed at college no experience of success in any of those ways which mark the undergraduate for brief authority or fame. He had never been accepted for the crew nor for the teams that represented the university on diamond or gridiron, though he had always participated in athletics, and was possessed of unusual strength. None of the professions had appealed to him, and he had not heeded his father's wish that he enter the law. The elder Saxton, who was himself a lawyer of moderate success, died before John's graduation; he had lost his mother in his youth, and his only remaining relative was a sister who married before he left college.

[Pg 7]

A review of these brief and discouraging annals did not hearten him; but he fell back upon the better mood with which he had begun the morning; he had a new chance, and he proposed to make the best of it. He put aside his coat and hat, lighted the pipe which he had been holding in his hand, and opened his desk. The banker had sent up the combination of the safe, as he had promised, and Saxton began inspecting its contents and putting his office in order.

[Pg 8]

[Pg 8]

"I'm in for a long stay," he reflected. "Watson and Terrell and those other fellows are just about reaching Park Street, perhaps with virtuous thoughts of having given me a job, if they haven't forgotten me. It's probably a pleasant day in Boston, with the flowers looking their best in the Gardens; but this is better than my Wyoming pastures, anyhow." The books and papers began to interest him, and he was soon classifying the properties that had fallen to his care. He was one of those fortunate individuals who are endowed with a capacity for complete absorption in the work at hand,—the frequent possession of persons, who, like Saxton, enjoy immunity from visits of the alluring will-o'-the-wisps that beguile geniuses. He was so deeply occupied that he did not mark the flight of time and was surprised when a boy came with a message from Porter that he was ready to go to luncheon.

"Yon mustn't overdo the thing, young man," said the banker amiably, as he closed 

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