merit to be accepted. The energy and aptitude
which I displayed throughout delighted and surprised my father, and I
believe, although I say it whose tongue should be tied, that they alone
prevented Muskegon capitol from being the eyesore of my native State.

Altogether, I was in a cheery frame of mind when I returned to the
commercial college; and my earlier operations were crowned with a full
measure of success. My father wrote and wired to me continually. "You
are to exercise your own judgment, Loudon," he would say. "All that I do
is to give you the figures; but whatever operation you take up must be
upon your own responsibility, and whatever you earn will be entirely
due to your own dash and forethought." For all that, it was always clear
what he intended me to do, and I was always careful to do it. Inside
of a month I was at the head of seventeen or eighteen thousand dollars,
college paper. And here I fell a victim to one of the vices of the
system. The paper (I have already explained) had a real value of one
per cent; and cost, and could be sold for, currency. Unsuccessful
speculators were thus always selling clothes, books, banjos, and
sleeve-links, in order to pay their differences; the successful, on the
other hand, were often tempted to realise, and enjoy some return upon
their profits. Now I wanted thirty dollars' worth of artist-truck, for
I was always sketching in the woods; my allowance was for the time
exhausted; I had begun to regard the exchange (with my father's help)
as a place where money was to be got for stooping; and in an evil hour
I realised three thousand dollars of the college paper and bought my
easel.

It was a Wednesday morning when the things arrived, and set me in
the seventh heaven of satisfaction. My father (for I can scarcely say
myself) was trying at this time a "straddle" in wheat between Chicago
and New York; the operation so called is, as you know, one of the
most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board of finance. On the
Thursday, luck began to turn against my father's calculations; and by
the Friday evening, I was posted on the boards as a defaulter for the
second time. Here was a rude blow: my father would have taken it ill
enough in any case; for however much a man may resent the incapacity of
an only son, he will feel his own more sensibly. But it chanced that, in
our bitter cup of failure, there was one ingredient that might truly be
called poisonous. He had been keepi