your advice I purchased 200 shares of the Amalgamated
stock at $100 per share. When the stock dropped to 80,
remembering your strong advice I purchased 300 shares more,
and after it had advanced to 120, thinking it was surely
going to the 150 or 200 you mentioned, I bought 1,000,
putting up my 500 shares as margin. It has now dropped back
to 100, and the many stories I read in the papers are
causing me much anxiety. Do you still believe as you first
wrote me?

To which he received the following answer:

Mr. Lawson instructs me to say he received yours of ----.
His faith in the Amalgamated property, the men who control
and manage it, and the stock is the same as it always has
been. He, like yourself, added to his holdings at 120, and
as high as 129, and knowing what he does about the property,
and what the men who control and manage it, and with whom he
is intimately associated, say to him, he cannot believe the
yarns which are appearing in the press are other than the
vaporings of those stock-market critics who must write their
opinions of prominent stocks even though they have no means
of actually knowing anything about them.

While Mr. Lawson regrets that you have spread yourself out,
as you say in your letter, he can only answer your question
by the above, to wit, his faith in Amalgamated is the same
as from the beginning.

Later I received the following from one of the penal institutions of the
country:

You will observe by the postmark on this letter my present
place of residence. You probably knew that before, as the
press has had much to say about me of late.

I trust you and your associates are satisfied with
yourselves when you observe the hell you have caused others.
When I first wrote you about the Amalgamated stock I was an
honest, prosperous man. I had never committed a crime nor
done any great wrong to my fellow-beings. Relying upon what
you said publicly and the well-known record of the
Rockefellers and their partners, I committed acts which I
now know to my everlasting sorrow I should not have
committed. I had no intention of doing wrong, but when I saw
ruin staring me in the face I used, as I supposed only
temporarily, funds intrusted to me to protect my stocks from
being slaughtered at declining prices by