Page:The New Yorker 0019, 1925-06-27.pdf/3



Rewards

ver coffee in a lunch club, a group of bankers were amusing Mr. Barney M. Baruch with the re-telling of a story in the Saturday Evening Post. The plot, they explained, concerned a young man, of Jewish parentage, who devoted his life to playing the stock market. He hung over the ticker every day, selling whenever what stocks he held showed him a small profit, re-investing only after deliberation. His profits were small, cautious profits. One morning this young man was caught unawares, in the midst of complicated transactions, by the eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement. It was his mother's telephone call that reminded him, reproached him and begged him to observe it. The situation was worked up; everything material seemed to depend on his ignoring the edict of his religion; all his spiritual welfare hung upon his obeying her. After a bitter struggle, the young financier conquered himself. He left a stop-loss order at his broker's office and retired into seclusion, sans newspapers, sans telephone, sans all.

The next day the market went wild. Unchecked by his conservative tendency to take small profits, he found his holdings had made him rich.

The bankers chuckled over the twist.

"Who," suddenly boomed Mr. Baruch, "wrote that story?"

"A man named Garet Garrett," someone answered. Mr. Baruch was silent for a moment. He seemed to be weighing the possibilities of the case. At length:

"Sounds improbable, eh?"

"Utterly ridiculous; preposterous idea."

"Well, it isn't," Baruch shot back, "I told Garrett that story myself. It's about me. That's the story of the first real money I ever made."

The Week

he International Convention of Rotarians, in Cleveland, enjoys a snowball fight in the interest of service in business and Mr. Roald Amundsen returns from his North Pole flight. Mr. Robert M. LaFollette is buried and Mr. Henry Ford warns Big Business to be good. Herr President Von Hindenburg invites Gott to line up with the Fatherland again and the League of Nations decrees against the use of poison gases, or bacteria in the next war. The Commission on Race Relations finds that lynchings decreased in 1924 and a mob, in Utah, hangs a negro.

Yale, Harvard and Princeton award many degrees in arts and letters and a young lady, convicted of manslaughter, sells the story of her life to a local journal. Woman's entire garb, it is announced, weighs less now than her hat did fifteen years ago and Father's Day passes almost unnoticed. The Mayor of Middleton, N. Y. deems July 4 Defence plans silly and General Pershing pleads for preparedness.

Mr. William Harrison Dempsey asks $10,000 to give a boxing exhibition in Vienna and a student who starved to death while working his way through college is awarded a posthumous degree by the University of Pennsylvania. The Moderation League reports that drinking has increased greatly in the South and a Judge, hereabouts, observes that the sale of liquor is not immoral. The Lutherans restore "hell" into religious usage and a boy flips a coin to decide whether or not he shall rob his employer.

The Mayor of a New Jersey town has not spoken in ten years to his wife, who lives with him, and the Duchess of Westminster is granted a divorce. In Colorado a Grand Dragon of the Klan is fined $1,500 and, in New Jersey, Klan candidates are triumphant in the primary elections. The naval officer who ap-