s victimized down into a very precarious financial
predicament, to say nothing about the valuable and most vigorous and
productive years of his life, that were thrown into the scrap heap of
time, and had to be cancelled from his list of revenue-producers.

When you contemplate a steady wage asset of one hundred dollars per
month coming in with the regularity of clockwork and as sure as the
first day comes around (and the months go by very quickly), you think
you are in a fair way to make some of the local financiers look very
cheap in a few years to come. Why, this means twelve hundred dollars
every time the earth circumnavigates the sun, and is sixty thousand
dollars in fifty years, which is not very long to a man if he can start
just as soon as he passes the entrance and can build on no intervening
lay-off by getting on the wrong side of the boss. But when we offset
with our liabilities, such as tobacco money, moving picture money, car
fare, gasoline, rent, taxes, repairs to the auto, and other trifling
incidentals such as food and clothing, we find at the end of the lunar
excursion that there is no balance to salt down on the right side of our
ledger, and our little castle becomes submerged because it was built
with its foundation on the shifting sands.

But for all that, if a man and his money could be left alone--if money
were not such an envy-producer--if a man with money had not so many
friends and admirers and strangers who love him at first sight--all
might yet be well; and though he might not outclass some of the most
corpulent magnates, he might in time acquire considerable moss in his
own private, insignificant, Simple-Simon sort of way. But the laws of
nature have willed otherwise, and the strongest of us know that it is
needless to go into litigation with the laws of gravitation, or
spontaneous combustion.

Among the workings of nature (which some people say are all for the
best), there is a class of men who have, rather truthfully, been called
"sharks" on account of their fishlike habit of pouncing upon suckers
unawares and without the legal three days' grace being given, and of
loading them into their stomachs--finances and all--before the person
has time to draw and throw his harpoon. It all happens while you are
taking a mouthful of tea, or while you are reading the locals in the
_Ashcroft Journal_, and when the spell leaves, you find that you have
endorsed a proposition with a financial payment down