Page:Frank Stockton - Vizier of the two-horned Alexander.djvu/145

TWO-HORNED ALEXANDER "I will tell you a little story about one of my attempts to provide for the future. It was toward the end of the fifteenth century, about the time that Columbus set out on his first voyage of discovery,—and you would be surprised, considering the important results of his voyage, to know how little sensation it caused in Europe,—that I devised a scheme by which I thought I might establish for myself a permanent fortune. I was then living in Genoa, and was carrying on the same business in which I am now engaged. I was a broker, a dealer in money and commercial paper. I was prosperous and well able to carry out the plan I had formed. This plan was a simple one. I would purchase jewels, things easily carried about or concealed, and which would be valuable in any country or any age; and with this idea in my mind I spent many years in collecting valuable stones and jewels, confining myself generally to rings, for I wished to make the bulk of my treasures very small when compared with their value.

"About the middle of the sixteenth