foundation of independence for your old age. You will get out of Sobrante with the price of a second-class ticket on a vile fruit boat, and you'll be back here panhandling around for a job at a quarter of what I am offering you. For Heaven's sake, man, don't be a fool.”     

       “Oh, but I will be a fool,” John Stuart Webster answered; and possibly, by this time, the reader has begun to understand the potency of his middle name—the Scotch are notoriously pig-headed, and Mr. Webster had just enough oatmeal in his blood to have come by that centre-fire name honestly. “And you, you poor old horse, you could not possibly understand why, if you lived to be a million years old.”     

       He got up from his chair to the full height of his six-feet-one, and stretched one hundred and ninety pounds of bone and muscle.     

       “And so I shall go to Sobrante and lose all of this all-important money, shall I?” he jeered. “Then, by all the gods of the Open Country, I hope I may! Old man, you have browsed through a heap of literature in your day, but I doubt if it has done you any good. Permit me to map out a course of reading for you. Get a copy of 'Paradise Lost'       and another of 'Cyrano de Bergerac.' In the former you will find a line running somewhat thusly: 'What tho' the cause be lost, all is not lost!' And in the immortal work of Monsieur Rostand, let me recommend one little page—about fifteen lines. Read them, old money-grubber, and learn! On second thought, do not read them. Those lines would only be wasted on you, for you have become afflicted with hypertrophy of the acquisitive sense, which thins the blood, dwarfs the understanding, stunts the perception of relative values, and chills the feet. .     

       “Let me foretell your future for the next twenty years, Neddy. You will spend about forty per cent, of your time in this lounging-room, thirty per cent, of it in piling up a bank-roll, out of which you will glean no particular enjoyment, and the remaining thirty per cent, you will spend in bed. And then some bright morning your heart-beat will slow down almost imperceptibly, and the House Committee will order a wreath of autumn leaves hung just above Number Four domino table, and it will remain there until the next annual house-cleaning, when some swamper 'will say, 'What the devil is this stuff here for?' and forthwith he will tear it down and consign it to the 

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