n I got back to the club and talked about it at
dinner to my business friends, I found that I had only heard a small
part of it.

Real estate! That's nothing! Why they told me that fifteen years ago I
could have had all sorts of things,--trunk line railways, sugar
refineries, silver mines,--any of them for a song. When I heard it I was
half glad I hadn't sung for the land. They told me that there was a time
when I could have bought out the Federal Steel Co. for twenty million
dollars! And I let it go.

[Illustration: He showed me a church that I could have bought for a
hundred thousand.]

The whole Canadian Pacific Railway, they said, was thrown on the market
for fifty millions. I left it there writhing, and didn't pick it up.
Sheer lack of confidence! I see now why these men get rich. It's their
fine, glorious confidence, that enables them to write out a cheque for
fifty million dollars and think nothing of it.

If I wrote a cheque like that, I'd be afraid of going to Sing Sing. But
they aren't, and so they get what they deserve.

Forty-five years ago,--a man at the club told me this with almost a sob
in his voice,--either Rockefeller or Carnegie could have been bought
clean up for a thousand dollars!

Think of it!

Why didn't my father buy them for me, as pets, for my birthday and let
me keep them till I grew up?

If I had my life over again, no school or education for me! Not with all
this beautiful mud and these tar-paper shacks and corner lot fruit
stores lying round! I'd buy out the whole United States and take a
chance, a sporting chance, on the rise in values.

_IV.--My Unknown Friend_

HE STEPPED into the smoking compartment of the Pullman, where I was
sitting alone.

He had on a long fur-lined coat, and he carried a fifty-dollar suit case
that he put down on the seat.

Then he saw me.

"Well! well!" he said, and recognition broke out all over his face like
morning sunlight.

"Well! well!" I repeated.

"By Jove!" he said, shaking hands vigorously, "who would have thought of
seeing you?"

"Who, indeed," I thought to myself.

He looked at me more closely.

"You haven't changed a bit," he said.

"Neither have you," said I heartily.

"You may be a _little_ stouter," he went on critically.

"Yes," I said, "a little; but you're stouter yourself."

This of course would help to explain away any undue stoutness on my
part.

"No," I continued boldly and firmly, "you look just abou