Poor Oliver! I felt awfully sorry for him. He's such a brilliant-appearing fellow! It seemed to me as if he had struck an awfully hard run of luck since he graduated from college. He really is a civil engineer, but fate has swerved him into other lines, which I think is the cause of his checkered career. He always loved to build bridges and dams and toy railroads even as a small boy. After he finally succeeded in squeezing through college he conceived a foolish notion--foolish according to Tom--to take a course in Civil Engineering at Cornell. Of course he didn't have anything else to study--no bugbears like English Composition, Latin or Greek, so perhaps that is why he did so well in the Engineering. Anyhow he passed the examinations with some kind of an honour--the only one, poor boy, that he had ever been able to boast of in his life. Tom, who had pooh-poohed the idea of Oliver's wasting a year at Cornell, finally gave up his plan of putting the boy to work in his lumber camps, and Oliver started forth, hopes high and spirits aglow, to accept an engineering job in Arizona. On the way out, at Pittsburg, he stopped off to visit an old college friend for a fortnight, and at the end of the first week he wrote that he had struck a "gold mine." His friend's father was prominently connected with half a dozen banks in Pittsburg and had offered him a position. I could have told the friend's father that Oliver would never make a banker, but he found it out himself in a little while. After Oliver left Pittsburg everything went wrong with him. No civil engineering jobs presented themselves, no more friends' fathers, no more "gold mines" seemed to be available. After that Oliver became a regular rolling-stone. He couldn't seem to keep any of his positions, or he wouldn't, I don't know which. He tried everything. It was manufacturing automobile parts in Toledo; selling motorcycles in Buffalo; making out orders for plumbers' supplies in Cleveland. He fizzled miserably each time. He never had any money. He was forever sending to Tom or Alec for a check for fifty until his salary was due. He was forever running down to New York or over to Chicago for a class reunion or a dance. He was forever writing to me vivid descriptions of new "queens" he had met. It was when Tom and Alec had to pay fourteen hundred and fifty dollars for a "swell" little last season's roadster that Oliver had secured at a wonderful bargain from a friend of his in Akron (this was when he was a shipping clerk in a tire factory) and in which he had been sporting about through the streets of the place at a speed of thirty an hour, that he was summoned to the court of his older brothers, and after due consultation was sent up to Glennings Falls, like a convict, to work in the mines. His roadster was sold at a terrible sacrifice, he said, and that fact seemed at the time to be his greatest regret.