ELL," said Branty, "why don't you make it?

"Why, war." They were sitting in James Gollerson's private office, their chairs drawn up close to the large window, the broad plate-glass of which reached nearly to the floor. Outside was the murk and swirl of a Chicago afternoon in February. If either of the men had stood up he could have seen dimly down to the street below, where the roadway was blocked with an almost constant entanglement of cable-cars and heavy drays, while on the sidewalk (it was only possible from this altitude to see the one on the farther side of the street) two streams of squat black figures flowed unceasingly in either direction. Opposite, some eighty feet away, rose the smooth face of another huge office building, towering up until, even from here on the sixth floor, it was impossible to squeeze one's self near enough to the window to see so much as a strip of the sky overhead. James Gollerson had tried the experiment more than once and, failing, had gone so far as to seriously consider moving the offices of the Great Western Provision Company, of which he was the president, a few

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floors higher up-not that he attached much importance to the sky as such, but because it provoked him to know that he could not see it when he wished to.

He was a large man, with the ponderous physique and heavy voice which are possessed by so many of our wealthy self-made men of this generation, as almost to justify the belief that they are themselves in some way no unimportant factors in the achieving of worldly success. That James Gollerson was such a success there could be no question. He had been a millionaire any time these last fifteen years; but unlike many of his kind, he was not content to be only a millionaire. Probably he would have been puzzled if called upon to state what other rôle in life he either cared for or was qualified to fill. But, as the months and years rolled by, and as the last day of each month and each year saw him at his desk from eight o'clock in the morning until five o'clock in the evening, just as the first day of the month and the year had done, there had somehow been borne in upon him the conviction that this was not all that there ought to be in life.

There had been others-his acquaintances, his colleagues, and his competitors who had led the same life, and one by one they had dropped away. Some there were, men older than himself, who still worked as he was work

ing. Their time could not be far off. And, rather undefinedly, it terrified him to think that some day, one by one, these would go as the others had gone; and then, in a few years more, that he would go. His going would be no more important to the world at large than theirs; and it seemed to him that he would like to do something else with his life before it was taken from him than they had done, something else besides work, even if it was no more than to stop working for a while. What he would do when he stopped working he had never very clearly considered, or whether he would be able to support the burden of endless idleness. Only, he did not wish to die as they had done, at the desk.

So, some years before this, he had set a mark at the time when he would stop work, and the mark which he had set was not unnaturally a dollar mark. When his fortune, he had said to himself, reached a certain point, when apart from what he had invested in his immediate business, he had accumulated and set aside as much, in undeniable cash assets, as could be converted at whatever time that he might will it, making allowance for all reasonable fluctuations in values, into so much money-at that time he would leave his office forever.

Year by year the mark which he had set had come nearer; and year by year the desire grew upon him to reach that point and be done with it all. At first the goal had been but idly fixed and only occasionally thought of. By degrees it had come to be constantly in his mind's eye; and the vague wish to arrive at it had crystallized into a definite and ever-present longing, a haunting and persistent craving, that never left him by day and often kept him awake at night.

For more than half a decade he had made up his mind exactly in what month of what year he ought to be able to reach that place. Occasionally some unexpected perversity of the markets would compel a readjustment of his expectations, but a few weeks or a few months later the lost ground would be made up again, and when the spring of 1893 came the date which he had first

set was still the date on which his eyes were fixed. Only it was but two years away now.

Then came the panic.

There had never been danger of his failing or of the Great Western Provis ion Company becoming insolvent. That he knew. None the less there were nights when he awoke again and again from his uneasy slumber, haunted by dreams of bankruptcy, until he had been constrained to walk the floor till morning in very dread of the thoughts which came to him if he lay down. These were nights which followed days of horror-days in which his best friends, men whom he had believed to be as unassailable as himself, had gone down helplessly-days in which those to whom he had been indebted for help in his youth came to him and begged and prayed to be saved, going down on their knees before him in his officedays in which the news was brought to him of how this one of his old acquaintances had killed himself and this one had gone mad.

And through it all he saw that mark which he had set drawing farther and farther away.

His shrewdness had saved him from any large individual losses, but the mere universal shrinkage in values had contracted his fortune to four-fifths of its former dimensions. Things would right themselves some day, undoubtedly; but when? The months dragged slowly, and when the spring of 1895 came he saw, not two years more of work ahead of him, but five or eight, or it might be ten.

And the longing for rest became almost intolerable.

Through these times, as for many years before, his one close personal confidant among his business acquaintances had been Arthur Branty. To him he had poured out his hopes and his longings unreservedly. During their acquaintance the two had been together in many ventures, and to the other's acuteness the millionaire packer had been indebted for not a few of his most successful strokes. On the other hand, whenever Branty made a hundred thousand dollars for his friend he picked up ten thousand for himself, which he

was too deeply engaged to see Mr. Bartlett, and which seemed to be that of seeing how far he could tilt his chair back without upsetting. It was many minutes before he turned to the table to see what the clerk had left him. He ran his eye over the telegrams and pushed them to one side. Less rapidly he read the other documents, affixing a signature here and there. Then he thrust them aside also and touched an electric button. The clerk came into the room and removed the letters and telegrams without a word. The millionaire took a pencil and began making figures on a slip of paper; and they were big figures. Whether the conclusions which he drew from them were satisfactory or not it would have been hard to say; but they were evidently interesting, and even disturbing. He arose and paced the room, stopping once in a while to gaze out of the window, from which, however, nothing now was to be seen under the fast falling blackness, and again returning to his seat to make more figures.

In the days which followed, Arthur Branty spent even more time than usual with the president of the Great Western Provision Company. They were closeted together for hours, and on most days took their lunch in company. One morning, when Branty arrived, he was accompanied by Brane, the head of the detective agency which bears his name. It was at two o'clock in the afternoon that they arrived, and it was after five before the conference broke up. When Brane had withdrawn the other two stood in silence a while.

"I think," said Branty at last, "that we'd better begin buying at once. It will take six or eight weeks any way to set anything going, but we shall need all that if we are going to get a good grip without putting the markets up." "We shall need all of it," assented the other.

"I've got those figures that I spoke of over in my office," said Branty, "and I'll bring them up to-morrow and see how they gibe with yours. Shall you touch wheat at all?"

"I think not," said the packer, whose eyes were fixed on that mark that was

set up. "We can do all any man could want without that."

"I guess that's so. Supposing the thing goes, it is only a question of where we choose to stop. I tell you, Gollerson, I believe that everything that has ever been done is going to be just child's play compared to this."

But the packer was standing, gazing out of the window, and made no response.

It would have been ridiculous in any country but France that what was really no more than a personal difference of opinion on a point of art criticism between the head of the government in his private capacity and a disappointed and embittered candidate for the Academy, should have developed into a national issue and precipitated a cabinet crisis.

There are certain constitutional maladies which so permeate and, as it were, take grip of every part of the system, that whenever the person who is infected with one of them, even though it may have lain dormant for years, suffers any sudden shock or lesion, that shock or lesion will immediately and-seemingly most illogically-tend to develop the symptoms of this deep-seated disease. An inherited taint of scrofula, unsuspected from birth, may be brought to the surface in a man by the breaking of a finger. A sudden chill will reawaken the germs of tuberculosis which have slumbered for twenty years.

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So in the body of the French people even the slightest untoward influence tends to provoke or runs to" Revanche. It was not, therefore, remarkable that as soon as the cabinet crisis occurredhowever absurd and remote the causes of it may have been-all tongues in Paris should have begun talking of Berlin. That had happened before. And up to this point the course of events was the result of accident and not designed of any man; it only made it perhaps a little easier for man to intervene, and increased the readiness of France to catch the first rumors of trouble on the frontier.

The famous "Plançon incident" was in itself trivial, and it is difficult to blame the German authorities. Eugène