addressed to him
at Cappadocia another must have gone with it to a certain commercial
agency, requesting that Charles Millard, of Cappadocia, New York, be
carefully looked up. Two weeks later Masters wrote that it had been
found necessary to employ a correspondent to aid the cashier of the
bank. The salary would be two thousand dollars if Mr. Millard would
accept it. The offer, he added, was rather larger than would be made to
any one else, as the officers of the bank preferred to have a
stockholder in a semi-confidential position such as this would be. In
village scales two thousand dollars a year was much, but when Charley
came to foot up the expenses of his first year in New York, this salary
seemed somewhat less munificent.

Millard's relations were directly with the cashier, Farnsworth, an
eager, pushing, asthmatic little man, wholly given to business.
Farnsworth's mind rarely took time to peep over the fence that divided
the universe into two parts--the Bank of Manhadoes and its interests
lying on the one side, and all the rest of creation on the other. Not
that he ignored society; he gave dinner parties in his elegant
housekeeping apartment in the Sebastopol Flats. But the dinner parties
all had reference to the Bank of Manhadoes; the invitations were all
calculated with reference to business relations, and the dinners were
neatly planned to bring new business or to hold the old. But there were
dinners and dinners, in the estimation of Farnsworth. Some were aimed
high, and when these master-strokes of policy were successful they
tended to promote the main purposes of the bank. The second-rate dinners
were meant merely to smooth the way in minor business relations.

It was to one of these less significant entertainments, a dinner of not
more than three horse-power, that he invited his correspondent-clerk,
Mr. Millard. It would make the relations between him and Millard
smoother, and serve to attach Millard to his leadership in the bank
management. Millard, he reasoned, being from the country, would be just
as well pleased with a company made up of nobodies in particular and his
wife's relatives as he could be if he were invited to meet a railway
president and a leather merchant from the swamp turned art connoisseur
in his old age.

Charley found his boarding-house a little "poky," to borrow his own
phrase, and he was pleased with Farnsworth's invitation. He honored the
occasion by the purchase of a new black sa