unbearable. His father, incensed beyond hope of pardon, turned a
deaf ear to further appeals, and finally cut off his allowance
altogether, hoping to teach him a lesson. Soon his clothes got shabby,
he was forced into cheap lodgings, his fair-weather friends forgot to
bow to him.

That was the beginning of the end. He drifted lower and lower until he
was forced to go to work or starve. He knew no trade. He was obliged to
accept what he could get. He turned his hand to anything, often making
barely enough to secure himself a night's lodging. Finally, when things
seemed at their darkest, he heard there was a demand for stokers on the
Blue Star Line. What he had suffered down there in that hell's furnace
no man knew! The poor devils who had to do the work never survived to
tell of their devilish toil. If these millionaires who liked to travel
in fast ships knew the physical agony the vessel's speed cost a human
being, they would refuse to patronize them. Thank God those days were
over! No matter what happened, he would never go back to the
stoke-hold.

That night as he lay on his cot in his Bowery lodging-house he tossed
uneasily, unable to sleep, wondering what Coxe & Willoughby, Attorneys,
of 27 Broad Street, wanted with him.

CHAPTER XXI.

Broad Street, just before the stock-market begins its daily orgy of
frenzied finance, is perhaps the most orderly and imposing of any of the
splendid thoroughfares in New York's commercial center. Strange to say,
it also fits its name, having almost three times the width of any other
street in the down-town district. From the Wall Street end where the
Sub-Treasury faces the old-fashioned premises of J. Pierpont Morgan &
Co.'s banking-house, Broad Street sweeps round in a noble curve, lined
on either side with stately office-buildings, rivaling each other in
beauty of architectural design. The imposing building opposite
ornamented with bas reliefs and noble marble columns is the Stock
Exchange, where the unsophisticated lamb is ruthlessly sheared by bull
and bear, and farther on, without other roof than the blue vault of
heaven, are the noisy curb brokers, so called because, having no
building of their own in which to transact their business, they are
permitted by time-honored custom to trade in a roped-off enclosure in
the middle of the street.

It was absolutely terra incognita to Armitage, and he gazed open-eyed
around him like any country yokel seeing the sights of th