he controlled however, and
most of which he owned, drew out large sums and put in their place
mortgages on, or securities in, new companies which he was
organizing--tricks which were the ordinary routine of Wall Street and
hence rather ridiculous as the sub-stone of so vast a hue and cry.

I was puzzled and, more than that, moved by the drama of the man's
sudden end, for I understood a little of finance and its ways, also of
what place and power had plainly come to mean to him. It must be
dreadful. Yet how could it be, I asked myself, if he really owned
fifty-one per cent or more in so many companies that he could be such a
dark villain? After all, ownership is ownership, and control, control.
On the face of the reports themselves his schemes did not look so black.
I read everything in connection with him with care.

As the days passed various other things happened. For one thing, he
tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window of his studio in New
York; for another, he tried to take poison. Now of a sudden a bachelor
sister, of whom I had never heard in all the time I had known him, put
in an appearance as his nearest of kin--a woman whose name was not his
own but a variation of it, an "-ovitch" having suddenly been tacked onto
it. She took him to a sanitarium, from which he was eventually turned
out as a criminal, then to a hospital, until finally he surrendered
himself to the police. The names of great lawyers and other bankers
began to enter the case. Alienists of repute, those fine chameleons of
the legal world, were employed who swore first that he was insane, then
that he was not. His sister, who was a physician and scientist of
repute, asked the transfer of all his property to her on the ground that
he was incompetent and that she was his next of kin. To this she swore,
giving as her reasons for believing him insane that he had "illusions of
grandeur" and that he believed himself "persecuted by eminent
financiers," things which smacked more of sanity than anything else to
me. At the same time he and she, as time rather indicated, had arranged
this in part in the hope of saving something out of the great wreck.
There were other curious features: Certain eminent men in politics and
finance who from revelations made by the books of the various banks were
in close financial if not personal relations with X---- denied this
completely. Curiously, the great cry on the part of these was that he
was insane, must