oo massive, much to his own disappointment, but the honors he
failed to secure there he won in the field events, and in the
surreptitiously staged boxing and wrestling bouts when, hidden away in
the cellar of some secret society hall, he would crush his opponents
with an ease and a peculiar glint of satisfaction in his gray eyes
that was grimly prophetic of days to come. His mental attitude toward
contests for superiority of whatever nature did not differ essentially
from that of the Roman gladiators: he entered them to win. If he fell,
well and good; he expected "thumbs down." If he won, his opponent need
look for no exhibition of generosity on his part. When his man lay
prone before him, he stooped and cut his throat. And he would have
loathed the one who forbore to do likewise with himself.

In scholarship he might have won a place, had not the physical side of
his nature been so predominant, and his remarkable muscular strength
so great a prize to the various athletic coaches and directors. Ames
was first an animal; there was no stimulus as yet sufficiently strong
to arouse his latent spirituality. And yet his intellect was keen; and
to those studies to which he was by nature or inheritance especially
attracted, economics, banking, and all branches of finance, he brought
a power of concentration that was as stupendous as his physical
strength. His mental make-up was peculiar, in that it was the epitome
of energy--manifested at first only in brute force--and in that it was
wholly deficient in the sense of fear. Because of this his daring was
phenomenal.

Immediately upon leaving college Ames became associated with his
father in the already great banking house of Ames and Company. But the
animality of his nature soon found the confinement irksome; his
father's greater conservatism hampered his now rapidly expanding
spirit of commercialism; and after a few years in the banking house he
withdrew and set up for himself. The father, while lacking the boy's
fearlessness, had long since recognized dominant qualities in him
which he himself did not possess, and he therefore confidently
acquiesced in his son's desire, and, in addition, gave him _carte
blanche_ in the matter of funds for his speculative enterprises.

Four years later J. Wilton Ames, rich in his own name, already
becoming recognized as a power in the world of finance, with
diversified enterprises which reached into almost every country of the
globe, hastened