colleges, more than all we've
got, and they take it?"

"That's different," said the Wizard. "He's in with them. They all know
him. Why, he's a sort of chairman of different boards of colleges, and
he knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it's no
wonder that if he offers to give a pension, or anything, they take it.
Just think of me going up to one of the professors up there in the
middle of his teaching and saying; 'I'd like to give you a pension for
life!' Imagine it! Think what he'd say!"

But the Tomlinsons couldn't imagine it, which was just as well.

So it came about that they had embarked on their system. Mother, who
knew most arithmetic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all the
stocks and bonds in the front page of the _Financial Undertone_, and on
her recommendation the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by
their letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to their
deliberations.

"I'd buy some of this R.O.P. if I was you," said mother; "it's gone
down from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it'll be all gone in ten
days or so."

"Wouldn't 'G.G. deb.' be better? It goes down quicker."

"Well, it's a quick one," she assented, "but it don't go down so
steady. You can't rely on it. You take ones like R.O.P. and T.R.R.
pfd.; they go down all the time and you know where you are."

As a result of which, Tomlinson would send his instructions. He did it
all from the rotunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with a
telegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thus
through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish
R.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a
mule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word was
whispered that the "Tomlinson interests" were after the R.O.P. to
reorganize it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled for the
stock.

And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizard
of Finance saw himself beaten.

"It's no good, mother," he repeated, "it's just a kind of Destiny."

Destiny perhaps it was.

But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very moment when he
sat with the Aladdin's palace of his golden fortune reared so strangely
about him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.

Destiny, so it would seem, was devising Its own ways and means of
dealing with Tomlinson's fortune. As one of the ways and means, De