es and
stores and mills. Each will employ a capital of from two to two hundred
millions of dollars. Over all, and to own the stock of those smaller
ones, we must throw a giant company. Do you know what it will require?
Do you realize what its capital must be? It will call for the cost price
of an empire, my friend; it will demand full thirty billions! Think of
the president of such a company! He will have rank by himself; he will
tower above kings. What shall we call it? Name it for that mighty
Portuguese who was first to send his ship around the globe; name it
Credit Magellan!"

Mr. Harley wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was a day in October,
one reasonably cool, and yet, when Storri ended with his Credit Magellan
and came to a full stop, Mr. Harley was in a perspiration. It was those
thirty billions that did it. Mr. Harley was no stoic to sit unmoved in
the presence of such wealth, and the graphic Storri made those billions
real.

When Storri had done, Mr. Harley gulped and gasped a bit, and then asked
if he might retain the armful of papers for further consideration. He
would like to go over them carefully; particularly those Canadian
reports and assurances that related to the canal.

"My dear, good friend," cried Storri, with a magnificent wave of the
hand, "you may do what you will!"

There are men, reckoned shrewd in business, whose shrewdness can be
overcome by ciphers. It is as though they were wise up to seven figures.
Mr. Harley was of these; he had his boundaries. His instincts were
solvent, his policies sound, his suspicions full of life and courage, so
that you went no higher than nine millions. Burdened beyond that, his
imagination would break down; and since his instincts, his policies, and
his suspicions rested wholly upon his imagination, when the latter fell
the others must of need go with it. There is a depth to money just as
there is to a lake; when you led Mr. Harley in beyond the
nine-million-dollar mark he began to drown. When Storri--Pelion upon
Ossa--piled steamship on railway, and canal on steamship, and banking
and lumber and mining and twenty other companies on top of these, Mr.
Harley was dazed and benumbed. When Storri concluded and capped all with
his Credit Magellan, capital thirty billions, it was, so far as Mr.
Harley is to be considered, like taking a child to sea. In the haze and
the blur of it, Mr. Harley could see nothing, say nothing; his impulse
was to be alone and coll