an most," said I. "Everybody
advertises, each one adapting his advertising to the needs of his
enterprises, as far as he knows how."

"That's true enough," he confessed. "But there are enterprises and
enterprises, you know."

"You can tell 'em, Sam," said I, "that I never put out a statement I don't
believe to be true, and that when any of my followers lose on one of my
tips, I've lost on it, too. For I play my own tips--and that's more than
can be said of any 'financier' in this town."

"It'd be no use to tell 'em that," said he. "Character's something of
a consideration in social matters, of course. But it isn't the chief
consideration by a long shot, and the absence of it isn't necessarily
fatal."

"I'm the biggest single operator in the country," I went on. "And it's my
methods that give me success--because I know how to advertise--how to keep
my name before the country, and how to make men say, whenever they hear
it: 'There's a shrewd, honest fellow.' That and the people it brings me,
in flocks, are my stock in trade. Honesty's a bluff with most of the big
respectables; under cover of their respectability, of their 'old and
honored names,' of their social connections, of their church-going and
that, they do all sorts of queer work."

"To hear you talk," put in Sam, with a grin, "one would think you didn't
shove off millions of dollars of suspicious stuff on the public through
those damn clever letters of yours."

"There's where you didn't stop to think, Sam," said I. "When I say a
stock's going to rise, it rises. When I stop talking about it, it may go on
rising or it may fall. But I never advise anybody to buy except when I have
every reason to believe it's a good thing. If they hold on too long, that's
their own lookout."

"But they invest--"

"You use words too carelessly," I said. "When I say buy, I don't mean
_invest_. When I mean invest, I say invest." There I laughed. "It's a
word I don't often use."

"And that's what you call honesty!" jeered he.

"That's what I call honesty," I retorted, "and that _is_ honesty." And
I thought so then.

"Well--every man has a right to his own notion of what's honest," he said.
"But no man's got a right to complain if a fellow with a different notion
criticizes him."

"None in the world," I assented. "Do _you_ criticize me?"

"No, no, no, indeed!" he answered, nervous, and taking seriously what I had
intended as a joke.

After a while I dragged in _the_ su