forward and led me into a
corner, where his assistant and the chef awaited me. All with tremendous
earnestness asked, "Is it safe, Mr. Lawson, for us to put our savings in
Amalgamated?" They took my breath away by telling me they proposed to
subscribe for one thousand, five hundred, and two hundred shares each,
$100,000, $50,000, and $20,000 worth, if I but said the word.

"_Dollars, dollars, dollars_" beat a tattoo on my ear-drums as the rain
used to on the roof at the old farmhouse.

A moment later Manager Thomas of the great hotel slipped up to me. "I'm
in for a thousand or two, if you say the word," he whispered. At dinner
my old waiter, who I would have sworn did not know a stock certificate
from a dog license, bent over respectfully to tell me that twenty of the
boys had chipped in and desired me to take their thousand dollars and
put it up for two hundred shares--$20,000 worth more. Room Clerk Palmer
called over to me as I went by his desk a moment later to say he was
going in for three hundred shares if it broke him. And so it
went--bell-boys, chambermaids, valets, elevator men, all begging an
interview, and all with the same request--"Would I not put their savings
into this magic money-maker?"

All were friends or proteges of mine, these managers, clerks, stewards,
and waiters. Their money was more sacred to me than my own. I had been
instrumental in bringing many of them up to the palace of American
dollar royalty from the old Brunswick, and I would rather have lost a
finger any day than have jeopardized their savings. For all of them I
had but one answer: "Go your limit."

I looked over the memoranda and telegrams piled high on the table in my
room, all recording the whirlwind sweep of this tremendous copper
movement that I had set a-booming.

"_Dollars, dollars, dollars._"

Requests from friends for some of the easy money I was dispensing to the
public, appeals from old associates for special allotments of the
subscription, urgent petitions from capitalists and bankers with whom I
had business relations that their bids for shares should have
preference, perfumed notes on tinted paper in feminine handwriting
begging aid, advice, my influence, on a hundred specious pleas. It
seemed to me that all the world was in a conspiracy of dollars and I the
one object of its plotting. For a moment there overcame me a sickening
disgust at this universal greed, at this all-absorbing passion for gold
which my moment