re imputed to the wonderful sagacity of Tomlinson.
Whereas if they had told him that X. Y. Z. had risen to the moon he
would have been just as wise as to what it meant.

"Well," said the wife of the Wizard as her husband finished looking
through the reports, "how are things this morning? Are they any better?"

"No," said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; "this is the worst
day yet. It's just been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same.
I can't do the figuring of it like you can, but I reckon I must have
made another hundred thousand dollars since yesterday."

"You don't say so!" said mother, and they looked at one another
gloomily.

"And half a million last week, wasn't it?" said Tomlinson as he sank
into a chair. "I'm afraid, mother," he continued, "it's no good. We
don't know how. We weren't brought up to it."

All of which meant that if the editor of the _Monetary Afternoon_ or
_Financial Sunday_ had been able to know what was happening with the
two wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated to
electrify all America.

For the truth was that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was attempting
to carry out a _coup_ greater than any as yet attributed to him by the
Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his
soul, crushed by the Grand Palaver, overwhelmed with the burden of high
finance, had become his aim, to be done with it, to get rid of his
whole fortune.

But if you own a fortune that is computed anywhere from fifty millions
up, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the preferred
stock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold in
hydraulic bucketfuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task of
losing it is no easy matter.

There are men, no doubt, versed in finance, who might succeed in doing
it. But they have a training that Tomlinson lacked. Invest it as he
would in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock,
the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful
away, back came two in its place. And at every new coup the crowd
applauded the incomparable daring, the unparalleled prescience of the
Wizard.

Like the touch of Midas, his hand turned everything to gold.

"Mother," he repeated, "it's no use. It's like this here Destiny, as
the books call it."

* * * * *

The great fortune that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was trying his
best to lose had come t