Page:Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son.djvu/96

Rh and start a magazine, maybe, and before midnight he'd be turning away subscribers because his preses couldn't print a big enough edition. Or perhaps he wouldn't feel literary that night, and so he'd invent a system for speculating in wheat and go on pyramiding his purchases till he'd made the best that Cheops did look like a five-cent plate of ice cream. All he ever needed was a few hundred for a starter, and to get that he'd decide to let me in on the ground floor. I want to say right here that whenever any one offers to let you in on the ground floor it's a pretty safe rule to take the elevator to the roof garden. I never exactly refused to lend Charlie the capital he needed, but we generally compromised on half a dollar next morning, when he was in a hurry to make the store to keep from getting docked.

He dropped by the office last week, a little bent and seedy, but all in a glow and trembling with excitement in the old way. Told me he was President of the Klondike