visitor out, he returned to Monroe with
an expression of weariness on his handsome face. "So many affairs to
think of! so many people to see! Really, it is becoming vexatious. I
believe I shall turn hunks, and get a reputation for downright
stinginess."

"But your visitors are pleasant people," said Monroe,--"and the last,
certainly, was a man whom most men think it an honor to know."

"You mean Wyndham. Oh, yes, Wyndham _is_ a good fellow; a little prosy
sometimes, but means well. We endure the Dons, you know, if they _are_
slow."

Monroe thought his friend hardly respectful to the head of the Wyndham
family, but set it down as an awkward attempt at being facetious.

"Well, about that money of yours?" said Sandford.

"I left it, as a loan on call, at Danforth's. But how do you propose to
invest it?"

"I haven't fully made up my mind. Perhaps it is best you should not
know. I will guaranty you eight per cent., and agree to return the
principal on thirty days' notice. So you can try, meanwhile, and see if
you can do better."

Monroe agreed to the proposal, and drew a check on the broker for the
amount, for which Sandford signed a note, payable thirty days after
presentation. The friends now separated, and Monroe went to his
warehouse.

Stockholders began to come to look over the morning papers, and chat
about the news, the stocks, and the degeneracy of the times. What a club
is to an idle man of fashion,--what a sewing-society is to a
scandal-loving woman,--what a billiard-room is to a man about
town,--what the Athenaeum is to the sober and steadfast
bibliolater,--that is the Insurance Office to the retired merchant, bald
and spectacled, who wanders like a ghost among the scenes of his former
activity. The comfortable chairs, and in winter the social fires in open
grates,--the slow-going and respectable newspapers, the pleasant view of
State Street, and, above all, the authoritative disposition of public
affairs upon the soundest mercantile principles of profit and loss,--all
these constitute an attraction which no well-brought-up Bostonian, who
has money to buy shares, cares to resist, at least until the increasing
size of his buckskin shoes renders locomotion difficult.

To all these solid men Mr. Sandford gave a hearty good-morning, and a
frank, cheerful smile. They took up the journals and looked over the
telegraphic dispatches, thinking, as they were wont, that the old Vortex
was lucky, above all Compan