have applied to all your friends in
New York, you say, without avail?"

"Entirely. The few who have any faith in my professions are powerless to
give me employment."

"Let me see: to-day is Wednesday. Can you call again on Saturday, Mr.
Prime? Mind, I promise nothing. In fact, I have every reason to believe
that I shall be unsuccessful."

The appointment thus made was due to my touching the electric bell in my
office,--a signal agreed upon as an indication of my desire to assist
any applicant for aid. Accordingly, when I entered Mr. Chelm's room
after his visitor was gone, I was greeted with a bantering smile.

"How now, my fair philanthropist! What scheme have you to relieve the
plight of this knight-errant?"

"In the first place," I said, "who is he? Do you believe his story? What
sort of a person was his father?"

"Three questions in one breath! The last is the easiest to answer. This
young man's father was one of the wealthiest bankers in New York fifteen
years ago. I knew him well: a man who was the very soul of honor, shrewd
and liberal in his business notions, and in his bearing the pattern of a
finished gentleman,--one of your genuine aristocrats; and, like his son,
a bit of a dandy. He came to grief, as so many of us do, through
misplaced confidence. Certain parties whom he trusted implicitly made a
wreck of his entire fortune. It was said at the time that he might have
saved a large portion of it, had he been willing to take advantage of a
legal technicality as against his creditors. But, as his son said, he
preferred to remain honest. He died not many years ago, and left this
boy very little, I fancy, but an untarnished name. Of the son I know
really nothing. I have never seen him before. He is not unlike his
father in appearance, and is even more fastidious in his dress. That may
be from bravado, of course. What he says about gentlemen not having a
fair chance in this country has a certain amount of truth in it."

"A great deal of truth, it seems to me," I answered.

"Very likely. But it is to be borne in mind that the so-called gentlemen
have a heavy score against them in the past. They have had their
innings; and now that they are out, democracy is not disposed to let
them off too easily. The sins of the forefathers being visited on the
children is a proverb as stable as the hills in its logical results."

"Yes. But do you not think it is cruel to turn the cold shoulder on a
man merely because he