, his grand manners, and his easy, confident hope and
conviction about the huge sums that were to come into his possession
"within a few days."

A DILETTANTE IN REAL ESTATE

Do not imagine that this man's dreams of great and easy fortunes were mere
idle fancies--far from it. He was nearly always engaged in negotiations
for some big deal. One of his favorite pastimes was to hunt up large
holdings of real estate offered for sale, go to the owners, represent
himself as a real estate broker, and secure permission to put these
properties on his "list." This permission obtained, he would go about
trying to find buyers. But his ideas of real estate values, of the
adaptation of properties to purchasers, of the details of a real estate
transaction and of salesmanship were so vague and so impractical that if
he ever succeeded in selling a piece of real estate, we have not yet heard
of it. He lacked the practical sense necessary to inform himself upon such
important matters as taxes, assessments, insurance rates, trend of
population, direction and character of commercial expansion, bank
clearings, freight shipments, volume of retail and wholesale business,
projected municipal and public service improvements, crop reports, output
of manufacturies, and many other items which form the basis for
intelligent negotiation, in a real estate deal. He could talk only in
glittering generalities, and his suggestions were usually so impracticable
that he failed to secure the confidence of those who were in a position to
purchase properties so valuable as those he invariably hit upon for his
ambitious projects.

AN UNDESERVED BAD REPUTATION

Here, then, was a man of unusual intelligence and capacity along
theoretical, abstract, philosophical, and spiritual lines. His intentions
were good. He was kindly, sympathetic, generous to a fault, refined,
ambitious, high principled at heart and a thorough gentleman by birth,
training, and instinct. Yet, because of a lack of clear knowledge, his
life has been one of hardship, privation, disappointment, disillusionment,
galling poverty, and utter failure. He has been subjected to ridicule and
the even more blighting cruelty of good-natured, patronizing, contemptuous
tolerance. His reputation is that of a lazy, good-for-nothing,
disreputable dead beat and loafer. And yet, in a sense, nothing is further
from the truth. Notwithstanding his many disappointments, no one could
have been more sincere than