mporarily--a new residence for each accident;
but, as she moved from city to city, she was able to keep up the
same old ruse for years.

Perhaps our most interesting client was the one who made his living
by supplying "to the trade" all kinds of corporate bonds and
certificates of stock. Some of these bonds had originally been
issued by corporations in good standing, but had been exchanged,
cancelled, outlawed, or in some other way had become valueless.
How our client secured them I never discovered. He also dealt in
the repudiated bonds of Southern cities and States, which can be
purchased for practically nothing almost everywhere.

His principal line of goods, however, was the bonds of companies
that he incorporated himself and disposed of at cut rates to a
clientele all his own. These companies all bore impressive names,
such as Tennessee Gas, Heat, and Power Company, the Mercedes-Panard-
Charon Motor Vehicle Supply Company, the Nevada Coal, Coke, Iron,
and Bi-product Company, the Chicago Banking and Securities Company,
the Southern Georgia Land and Fruit Company, and so on. He had an
impressive office in a marble-fronted building on Wall Street,
doors covered with green baize inside and gold lettering outside,
and he wore a tall hat and patent-leather shoes. He also had a
force of several young lady stenographers and clerks, who acted as
the officers and directors of his various concerns, all of which
were legally incorporated under the laws of West Virginia and New
Jersey. His clients were the gilt-edged "con" men of Wall and
Nassau Streets, who, when they needed them, could purchase a couple
of hundred engraved one-thousand-dollar bonds of imposing appearance,
in a real corporation, for a few hundred dollars in cash.

Our client did not act as an officer of these himself, but merely
took a power of attorney from the president, secretary, and treasurer,
authorizing him to sign their names to these bond issues. Yet no
one ever saw these officers, all of whom had names connotative of
wealth and financial responsibility. The Gates, Morgan, Rogers,
and other families multiplied and brought forth at the mere wave
of his pen. If you wished a half-million bond issue you simply
called him up on the telephone and some "Light and Power Company"
would hold a directors' meeting and vote a fifty-year debenture
gold seven-per-cent security that you could peddle around at fifty-
eight and one-eighth to unsuspecting i