"Twenty per cent! Twenty per cent! The madness of it! The holes and corners he had rushed into, in his frantic hunt for twenty per cent! A bank in Australia, a railroad in Ecuador, a sailing ship that never by any chance sailed into prosperity, a ginger-beer works in Denmark, a cement works in Spain, a foolish concern which proposed to earn vast sums by buying moribund bad debts, a drydock in Japan, and a lunatic-scheme for shoeing horses without nails! This last invention, if I remember rightly, was to fasten them with steel suspenders and a kind of cuff-button over the pastern! And we couldn't even leave the infernal things to die of inanition. Not content with paying no dividend, their familiar demons used to wake up and demand more capital. Calls! I would come home from school for my vacation and find my mother nearly crazy over another call. We were so simple that at first we paid them, and my father's old 'business friends' (he hadn't any others that I ever heard of) saw no objection. Humph! When I read in novels how a father's friends help the hero and heroine, succouring the widow and the fatherless, I must smile. I recall the days of our storm and stress, when those sleek and slippery wolves, the 'business friends' of my father, sat round waiting for my poor distracted, gallant-hearted mother to stumble and stagger in her struggle with those wild-cats of investments. Wild cats! Bengal tigers were a better name for them! But she didn't! She won out and defied the whole caboodle, as she called them when she was roused. She won out, or I shouldn't be here now, maybe. She was a mother fighting for her offspring, and many a shrewd knock they had from her. And the 'business friends' slunk away and we've never seen them since. They talk about the romance of big business. What about the tragedy of the small business? What about the dark and dirty meannesses of business? What about the 'business friend,' watching, watching for the weaker ones to fall? What sort of romance is there in battles between wolves and women, in wars without chivalry? Mercy? Consideration for the weak and helpless? Knightly courtesy towards women? You won't find any of them in business, I'm afraid. I remember often sitting in the room with my book, a school-boy on his holidays, while some smug specimen of the business-friend variety sat explaining and domineering over my mother, who did her best to understand. Perhaps she was difficult and stupid. It isn't every woman--or man either--who can keep a grasp on the details of banks and railroads and cement and ginger-beer and marine insurance and company-law and all the other tarradiddles that were going to yield twenty per cent and didn't yield twenty cents! I used to wonder if these men's own wives would be as intelligent as my mother in similar circumstances. Humph! I _saw_ those ladies in one or two instances when they were widowed and had to face the world without a man. I was astounded. To see those proud big-bosomed