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Rh making a very good thing out of him. His cheques came in very useful, I can tell you, my boy. But I was in sore want of a few hundreds just then, and was carefully scheming how I could get them.

That infernal rubber boom caused me to rush into speculation, like it did so many others, and now the day of reckoning was, alas! fast approaching.

I found myself once again in desperate straits. I was hard-worked, too, for just at that time another epidemic of influenza had broken out.

Old Farnell was a very hard nut as regards money matters, or I would have asked him point-blank for a loan. But I saw it was useless. He had given his son a handsome present on his marriage, and was for ever referring to it, declaring that he could ill-afford it.

Many men who are rich, plead poverty. Therefore I only smiled.

One autumn morning, however, when I called to visit him, the maid told me that he was in the small room at the end of the passage, an apartment which he called his business-room. Being so constantly in the house I walked along, and was about to push