"I quit Pittsburg with nothing but the price of a ticket to Chicago, though my brother told me the firm would send me a check for $500 or $1,000 for my services as an expert. When, with a beating heart, I returned to my dear Rogues' Gallery, all was change and dispersion. No more happy times in our little balcony of fellowship, which had overlooked in its irresponsibility the jarring sects and insects of this world: the most delightful place in this world to me is a home without a boss, and this home was for the time gone. The possibility of being unfair to Marie makes me draw a veil over the cause of the breaking-up of the Rogues' Gallery. "Poor Jim found that the firm would not pay me a cent for my really brilliant month's work, for the reason that I had refused to be a conventional boss and had no written or verbal contract or agreement. Jim therefore resigned, forfeiting fifty dollars of weekly salary and twenty-five thousand dollars in stock, ten thousand of which he had offered me to stay. Mr. Kirkman thought all the world of Jim and could not run the shop without him. Nor could he recover from the blow, for he loved my brother, as everybody did. Mr. Kirkman died a few weeks afterward, and after a year or two the firm went into the hands of a receiver. All this happened because of a few paltry dollars, which I did not ask for, for which I did not care a damn--and this is business! I heartily rejoice, if not in Mr. Kirkman's death, at least in the dispersion of his family and their being forced into our ranks, where there is some hope for them. "My brother Jim was one of the maimed ones in my family. Twenty years ago, defective machinery and a surgeon's malpractice made one arm useless. The Pittsburg affair broke up his beautiful home. He and his whole-souled wife and charming children, into whose eyes it was an entrancing rapture for me to look, were a family without a boss; they needed none, for they loved one another perfectly. Jim is dead now, and the best I can do is to send you his last letter; it has the brevity of grief: