nstead of jubilant over my narrow escape.

Joe followed me into my den. "What luck?" asked he, in the tone of a mother
waylaying the doctor as he issues from the sick-room.

"Luck?" said I, gazing blankly at him.

"You've seen the latest quotation, haven't you?" In his nervousness his
temper was on a fine edge.

"No," replied I indifferently. I sat down at my desk and began to busy
myself. Then I added: "We're out of the Coal combine. I've transferred our
holdings. Look after these things, please." And I gave him the checks,
notes and memoranda of agreement.

"Galloway!" he exclaimed. And then his eye fell on the totals of the stock
I had been carrying. "Good God, Matt!" he gasped. "Ruined!"

And he sat down, and buried his face and cried like a child--it was then
that I measured the full depth of the chasm I had escaped. I made no such
exhibition of myself, but when I tried to relight my cigar my hand trembled
so that the flame scorched my lips.

"Ruined?" I said to Joe, easily enough. "Not at all. We're back in the
road, going smoothly ahead--only, at a bit less stiff a pace. Think, Joe,
of all those poor devils down in the mining districts. They're out--clear
out--and thousands of 'em don't know where their families will get bread.
And though they haven't found it out yet, they've got to leave the place
where they've lived all their lives, and their fathers before them--have
got to go wandering about in a world that's as strange to them as the
surface of the moon, and as bare for them as the Sahara desert."

"That's so," said Joe. "It's hard luck." But I saw he was thinking only of
himself and his narrow escape from having to give up his big house and all
the rest of it; that, soft-hearted and generous though he was, to those
poor chaps and their wives and children he wasn't giving a thought.

Wall Street never does--they're too remote, too vague. It deals with
columns of figures and slips of paper. It never thinks of those
abstractions as standing for so many hearts and so many mouths, just as the
bank clerk never thinks of the bits of metal he counts so swiftly as money
with which things and men could be bought. I read somewhere once that
Voltaire--I think it was Voltaire--asked a man what he would do if, by
pressing a button on his table, he would be enormously rich and at the
same time would cause the death of a person away off at the other side of
the earth, unknown to him, and probably no more worthy to