come down
when it ceases going up. It has a shrewd trick of grafting sorrows on
our joys, and of handicapping success with discomfiting conditions. The
favorite of fortune whose feet have fallen in pleasant places sooner or
later stubs his toe.

Addicks' first "made dollars" certainly came easy--so easy, indeed, that
those who watched his early career marvelled at his success; but nowhere
on God's footstool is there to-day a more terrible illustration of the
inevitable workings of the law of compensation than the present
standing of J. Edward O'Sullivan Addicks affords.

The thief whose first excursion into a wayfarer's pocket is rewarded
with the equivalent of days and nights of honest labor will surely be
convinced thereafter of the superiority of theft over toil as a means of
money-getting. Invariably the manufacturer of "made dollars," after his
first coup, forsakes forever after the cold arithmetic of commerce for
the rule of guess, dream, hope, and "I will," which constitutes the
mathematics of high finance. Addicks' first "made dollars" came with
such magical ease that there awoke in his slumbering substitute for a
soul a disgust for those prosaic pursuits at which one could never, try
how one might, make more than four by the addition of two and two. He
probably argued to himself: "Why should I work in the flour business
when I know a way of getting overnight more than I can make out of flour
in a lifetime? If people are so simple in guarding their savings that I
can by a trick take away from them enormous wealth without the slightest
danger to my own safety or my profit, even if detected, why should I not
devote my life to such healthful and profitable occupation?" The logic
of the proposition was convincing. Accepting its conclusions, J. Edward
O'Sullivan Addicks, of Philadelphia, embarked on his career. Soon
afterward he discovered gas in Boston.

This was in 1887. Equipped with his "made dollars" for capital, his
impressive name, sublime effrontery, and a pedigree free from anything
suggestive of his new purpose in life, the ex-flour merchant "lit" into
our everything-figured-out-ahead-and-every-promise-made-taken-at-par
town of Boston. To appreciate the lights and shadows of this event, one
should know Boston and, at the same time, Addicks. Every country boy
will remember Tom Hood's poem beginning:

I remember, I remember the house where I was born,
With the little lattice window where the sun