nities.

What diligence and strict attention to business do men exhibit when they
start out to wreck their own lives and break the hearts of those near to
them! In a play by a modern writer, one scene presents Satan flying at
midnight over one of our cities, while the drunken songs and joyous
shouts of some gilded revelers rise in the night. The merry songs and
laughter are music to the ears of Lucifer. He pauses in his flight to
listen, and as the songs and shouts increase in volume he looks down on
the revelers and with a bitter sneer soliloquizes thus of them:

"Ye are my bondsmen and my thralls,
Your lives I fill with bitter pain."

And that sums it up pretty well; but we must look straight away from the
entrance of the Primrose Way to the exit.

Well, I had successfully played my trump card on the Rothschilds, and,
not seeing the end, thought I had won, and cleverly won; so before
sitting down to dinner I went to the telegraph office and telegraphed to
my partners:

"The Egyptians all passed over the Red Sea. But the Hebrews are
drowned therein."

Thinking this rather witty, I went to dinner well satisfied. An hour
past midnight the moon looked from behind a cloud and saw me, one of
many miserables, leaning over the bulwark of that wretched Dover
steamer, again paying tribute to Neptune.

CHAPTER XXII.

"ACCEPTED. LIONEL ROTHSCHILD."

When George and Mac received my telegram they, knowing the difficulties
of my mission, deemed it incredible that I had succeeded within a day,
so when my telegram came they thought I was attempting some jest. Upon
my arrival in London, walking into Mac's room--he being still in bed--I
announced that I had in my pocket Rothschild's bill for L6,000, drawn on
the London house. He flatly refused to believe me, but when he, and
later George, saw the bill, they were forced to believe. I at once took
it down to St. Swithin's lane, and, leaving it for acceptance, called
the next day, when I found scrawled across it in thin, pale ink the
mystic words "Accepted. Lionel Rothschild."

The bill itself was drawn on cheap, blue paper, on the same form as the
blank bills to be had at the Paris stationers', where I had bought some.
From Rothschilds' I went direct to the hotel where we had our
rendezvous, and the acceptance was so simple and easy that Mac had it
copied on another bill in ten minutes. The business methods of the bank
were so loose that there was no nec