re present; not but what the ideas are all right,
but somehow, when money talks I am always a fascinated listener.

I did not come here voluntarily, but at the pressing invitation of some
of my most pressing creditors on your committee. They said Secretary
Gage would be here, and Mr. J. P. Morgan, and that without my presence
the affair would seem incomplete, but that if we three got together we
could settle various perplexing financial problems right on the spot.
The committee told me to choose my own subject and they would endorse
anything I would say--without recourse. They delicately intimated,
however, that any playful allusions to the City Bank better be left
unsaid; and so I can only remark:--

"And I would that my tongue could utter,
The thoughts that arise in me!"

and let it go at that.

I must say, however, that Secretary Gage made one serious mistake. If he
had consulted me (which he never did, although he had abundant
opportunity) I would have advised him to put his money in an institution
I know about where it would have received a rousing welcome and where I
could have taken a fall out of it myself. If the price of the
Custom-House had gotten into my hands, and I'd been given twenty-four
hours' start, I believe I could have given the secretary a run for his
money. But, instead, he placed it in a rich, smooth-running, well-oiled
institution where it was used in averting a panic and straightening out
financial tangles, and greasing the wheels of commerce, and similar
foolishness.

This is the first opportunity I have had of meeting you Bank Presidents
collectively, and when you are thawed out. I have met most of you,
individually, when you were frozen stiff. I never supposed you could
warm up, as you seem to have done, my previous impressions having been
of the "How'd you like to be the iceman" order. Sometimes I have thought
I'd almost rather go without the money than get a congestive chill in a
Bank President's office, and have him gaze into my eyes, and read the
inmost secrets of my soul, and ask unfeeling questions, and pry rudely
into my past, and throw out wild suggestions about getting Mr. Astor to
endorse for me, and other similar atrocities. And even if I succeed in
deceiving him he leads me, crushed, humiliated and feeling like thirty
cents, to a fly cashier, who, taking advantage of my dazed condition,
includes in my three-months' note, not only Christmas and the Fourth of
July, but St.