Once his savings had gone in quite another fashion. It was at the very point when there seemed to have come a change for the better in his fortunes. He was $200 to the good at the end of the last autumn, and with this as an opening wedge he meant to force a way eventually to independent business of his own. So he went to Omaha, and, in one of the employment bureaus there, he met a man, past middle life, who offered him work on a stock farm twenty miles below the city. Thirty dollars a month were to be his wages from the first, if he proved himself worth so much, and there was to be an increase when he earned it. In the meanwhile, he would be learning the trade of rearing horses for the market, and, if he chose to invest his savings in the business, when he knew it better, there could be no surer way, his informer said, to a paying enterprise of his own. He was committing himself to nothing, he found, so he decided to give the place a trial. His new employer and he left the office together, and, having an hour before train time, they went to a restaurant for dinner, and the stock farmer told his man much in detail of the farm. He was an elderly person of quiet manner, very plain of speech, and friendly withal, and very thoughtful; for when they were about to leave the restaurant, he opened a small leather bag that he carried guardedly and, disclosing a bank book and a considerable sum of money, which he had drawn to pay the monthly wages of the hands, he suggested to our friend to deposit with them his own valuables in safety from the risk of pickpockets about the station and in the cars, adding, meanwhile, that he would then entrust the bag to him, as there were one or two places where he wished to call on the way to the train. The farm-hand held the bag firmly as his employer and he walked down the street together, and very firmly as he waited in a shop, where his boss left him with the plea that he had an errand in an office overheard, but would return in a few minutes. The minutes grew to an hour, and the youth would have been anxious had it not been that the bag with his savings was safe in his keeping. But when the second hour was nearly gone, his feeling was one of anxiety for the boss, until a question to the shop-keeper led to the opening of the bag and the discovery that it contained some old newspapers and nothing more. He went back to the farm then and worked all winter and through the summer that was now nearing its end, but illness in his family had consumed his earnings, and, at the end of fourteen years of labor, he was very much where he started as a lad, apart from added strength and experience.