as
thickly strewn with all those simple honors and good things which are so
often the heritage of families of the old, self-respecting,
God-fearing, middle-class communities of New England and like
long-settled sections of the country. On his death-bed the uncle
confessed that for years he had carried upon the books of the bank a
shortage which had arisen from mistakes. Her husband, to keep the
family's name from stain, had continued to keep this buried, which was
an easy thing to do, as when he was moved up from teller to cashier at
his uncle's death the two positions were combined into one. The wife
explained that her husband had let her into the fearful secret, and
together they had carried it until it had eaten its way into their
hearts. At last the man could no longer stand the strain. He had
followed my printed sayings about the market, and now had made the fatal
plunge. He had bought upon margin 2,000 shares of Sugar stock to see if
it were not possible to make up quickly a shortage of over $20,000,
because I had said Sugar was going right up; and then horror of worse
than death had seized the wife and she had given me the awful secret,
and a description, a word picture of what would happen if I had made a
mistake.

She could go no further. She did not need to. I read the letter. I saw
the picture, and even I, who believed myself from long years of
experience with such affairs immune--I, too, became horror-stricken. It
was no affair of mine. I had not said Sugar was going up; as is often
the case, some newspaper had printed what another operator had said and
credited it to me. I was not even operating in Sugar, nor at the time
particularly interested in it. I could not return the letter nor have
any communication with these persons without in a way becoming their
accomplice. The woman had said that with the purchase her husband had
given orders to sell the stocks at twelve points' rise.

Try as I might to look at the matter in a cold-blooded business way the
picture haunted me--the old gentleman proud of his family's long record
of sturdy honesty, the old mother's faith in her boy, the wife seeing on
each of her children the brand of a felon father, and the husband
watching each day's market prices to see whether they had brought him a
verdict which meant State's prison or permanent relief from the
haunting fear which had become his never-absent shadow; and I read and
reread the closing lines of the faithful wi