made him look as if
he were just about to cry. His eyes were blue and far away, and his
still, mournful face and his great bent shoulders seemed to suggest all
the power and mystery of high finance.

Gloom indeed hung over him. For, when one heard him talk of listed
stocks and cumulative dividends, there was as deep a tone in his quiet
voice as if he spoke of eternal punishment and the wages of sin.

Under his great hands a chattering viscount, or a sturdy duke, or a
popinjay Italian marquis was as nothing.

Mr. Boulder's methods with titled visitors investing money in America
were deep. He never spoke to them of money, not a word. He merely
talked of the great American forest--he had been born sixty-five years
back, in a lumber state--and, when he spoke of primeval trees and the
howl of the wolf at night among the pines, there was the stamp of
reality about it that held the visitor spellbound; and when he fell to
talking of his hunting-lodge far away in the Wisconsin timber, duke,
earl, or baron that had ever handled a double-barrelled express rifle
listened and was lost.

"I have a little place," Mr. Boulder would say in his deep tones that
seemed almost like a sob, "a sort of shooting box, I think you'd call
it, up in Wisconsin; just a plain place"--he would add, almost
crying--"made of logs."

"Oh, really," the visitor would interject, "made of logs. By Jove, how
interesting!"

All titled people are fascinated at once with logs, and Mr. Boulder
knew it--at least subconsciously.

"Yes, logs," he would continue, still in deep sorrow; "just the plain
cedar, not squared, you know, the old original timber; I had them cut
right out of the forest."

By this time the visitor's excitement was obvious. "And is there game
there?" he would ask.

"We have the timber-wolf," said Mr. Boulder, his voice half choking at
the sadness of the thing, "and of course the jack wolf and the lynx."

"And are they ferocious?"

"Oh, extremely so--quite uncontrollable."

On which the titled visitor was all excitement to start for Wisconsin
at once, even before Mr. Boulder's invitation was put in words.

And when he returned a week later, all tanned and wearing
bush-whackers' boots, and covered with wolf bites, his whole available
fortune was so completely invested in Mr. Boulder's securities that you
couldn't have shaken twenty-five cents out of him upside down.

Yet the whole thing had been done merely incidentally round a bi