Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/254

 months, and it was only when he asked me to draw checks and told me to whom they should be drawn that the whole thing came out."

Continuing, Mr. Morosini said: "Mr. Gould could enjoy immensely anything funny or ludicrous. We used to have a small window in the office through which I would talk to some of the unimportant callers, and through which Mr. Gould would also talk to people whom it was not necessary to bring into the inner room. One day a man came to the window and said, 'I want to see Mr. Gould.' I told him he could not see Mr. Gould unless he told me what he wanted. He replied, 'I have an invention here, and there's millions to be made out of it.' Mr. Gould was in the next room, and he said, 'Morosini, what is it the man wants?' and I told him, whereupon he got up and came to the window to talk to the man.

"When Mr. Gould appeared, the man put his hand under his coat as if to pull something out. I saw it glisten, and thinking it was a blunderbuss, I dodged down under the counter, and Mr. Gould seeing me go down dropped down also. 'Shoot high, you son of a gun,' I yelled out. Then the man laughed and said there was nothing to fear, and began to explain the nature of his invention. We got up and looked at it, and what do you think it was? He had a sort of a brass cylinder, and he said it was a patent portable churn. It was to be filled with cream in the morning when a man was starting away from home, and slung by a strap over his shoulder under his coat.