ich one was a copy and the
other an original. The circumstances which led up to the writing of them
were as follows: Two rich men, A. and B., had been engaged in a
business duel. It was desperate--_a outrance_,--dealing in large
figures; and each man had to call up all his reserves and put out all
his strength. At last the end came and A. was beaten--beaten and ruined.
Then the letters passed which I quote from memory:

"DEAR MR. B.:

"I know when I'm beaten and if I was quite sure you wouldn't
kick a man when he's down, I would come round to see you and
grovel. As perhaps you can guess, I am in a bad way.

"Yours truly, A."

"DEAR A.:

"There's no need to grovel. Come around to my house after
supper to-morrow night and let us see what we can do together
to put you straight.

"Yours truly, B."

I need hardly say that it was the second letter of which I saw the
original, or that it was A. who showed them to me, when they were
already several years old but still treasured, and A. was a wealthy man
again as a result of that meeting after dinner. A. told me briefly what
passed at that meeting. "He gave me a little more than half a million,"
he said. "Of course he has had it back long ago; but he did not know
that he would get it at the time and he took no note or other security
from me. At the time it was practically a gift of five hundred thousand
dollars."

And as I write I can almost hear the English reader saying, "Pooh! the
same things are done times without number in England." And I can hear
the American, still smarting under the recollection of some needlessly
cruel and unfair thrust from the hands of a competitor, smile cynically
and say that he would like to tell me certain things that he knows. Of
course there are exceptions on either side. It takes, as the American is
so fond of saying, "all kinds of men to make a world." It is the same
old difficulty of generalising about a nation or drawing up an
indictment against a whole people. But I do not think that any man who
has engaged for any length of time in business in both countries, who
has lived in each sufficiently to absorb the spirit of the respective
communities, will dissent from what I have said. Many Englishmen,
without knowledge of business in England, go to America and find the
atmosphere harder and less frien