rst act
before even the tree stumps were brown in their corn-fields was the
founding of a college, and whose corner-stone rested on a book,--why
these people should have come to represent a spirit of bargaining and an
aptitude for getting on unmatched by the keenest-witted Dutchman hath no
man yet told us.

The sharpest business men of the present are chiefly "Yankees;" and if
"Jew" and "a hard bargain" are counted synonymes, "New-Englander" has
equal claim to the place. The birthplace and home of all reform, New
England is the home also of a greed born of hard conditions and
developing a keenness unequalled by that of any other bargainer on
earth. The Italian, the Greek, the Turk, find a certain aesthetic
satisfaction in bargaining and do it methodically, but always
picturesquely and with a relish unaffected by defeat; but with the
Yankee it is a passionate, absorbing desire, sharpening every line of
the face and felt even in the turn of the head or shoulders, and in
every line of the eager, restless figure. Success assured softens and
modifies these tendencies. Defeat aggravates them. One meets many a man
for whom it is plain that the beginning of life held unlimited faith
that the great city meant a fortune, the sanguine conviction passing
gradually into the interrogative form. The fortune is still there. Thus
far the conviction holds good, but his share in it has become more and
more problematical. The flying and elusive shadow still holds for him
the only real substance, but his hands have had no power to grasp or
detain, and the most dogged determination gives way at last to the sense
of hopeless failure. For this type may be the ending as cheap clerk or
bookkeeper, with furtive attempts at speculation when a few dollars have
been saved, or a retreat toward that remote West which has hidden
effectually so many baffled and defeated lives. There may also come
another ending, and the feverish, scheming soul lose its hold on the
body, which has meant to it merely a means of getting and increasing
money.

It is this latter fate that came to a man who would have no place in
this record save for the fact that his last querulous and
still-questioning days were lived side by side with a man who had also
sought money, and having found it had chosen for it certain experimental
uses by means of which siphon he was presently drained dry. For him also
had been many defeats. A hospital ward held them both, and the two beds
we