was to draw out six dollars of it for present
use. Someone gave me a chequebook through a wicket and
someone else began telling me how to write it out. The
people in the bank had the impression that I was an
invalid millionaire. I wrote something on the cheque and
thrust it in at the clerk. He looked at it.

"What! are you drawing it all out again?" he asked in
surprise. Then I realized that I had written fifty-six
instead of six. I was too far gone to reason now. I had
a feeling that it was impossible to explain the thing.
All the clerks had stopped writing to look at me.

Reckless with misery, I made a plunge.

"Yes, the whole thing."

"You withdraw your money from the bank?"

"Every cent of it."

"Are you not going to deposit any more?" said the clerk,
astonished.

"Never."

An idiot hope struck me that they might think something
had insulted me while I was writing the cheque and that
I had changed my mind. I made a wretched attempt to look
like a man with a fearfully quick temper.

The clerk prepared to pay the money.

"How will you have it?" he said.

"What?"

"How will you have it?"

"Oh"--I caught his meaning and answered without even
trying to think--"in fifties."

He gave me a fifty-dollar bill.

"And the six?" he asked dryly.

"In sixes," I said.

He gave it me and I rushed out.

As the big door swung behind me I caught the echo of a
roar of laughter that went up to the ceiling of the bank.
Since then I bank no more. I keep my money in cash in my
trousers pocket and my savings in silver dollars in a
sock.

Lord Oxhead's Secret

A ROMANCE IN ONE CHAPTER

It was finished. Ruin had come. Lord Oxhead sat gazing
fixedly at the library fire. Without, the wind soughed
(or sogged) around the turrets of Oxhead Towers, the seat
of the Oxhead family. But the old earl heeded not the
sogging of the wind around his seat. He was too absorbed.

Before him lay a pile of blue papers with printed headings.
From time to time he turned them over in his hands and
replaced them on the table with a groan. To the earl they
meant ruin--absolute, irretrievable ruin, and with it
the loss of his stately home that had been the pride of
the Oxheads for generations. More than that--the world
would now know the awful secret of his life.

The earl bowed his head in the bitterness of his sorrow,
for he came of a proud stock. About him hung the portraits
of his ancestors. Here on the right an Oxhead w