And the Angora cat wiped off the back of his ear with his left paw and twirled his mustachios upward with a wave of his right, as he purred amiably over the cream. IV THE GOLDEN FLEECE There was once a miller who was very poor, but he had a beautiful daughter. There were a great many people who said that if he had not had so beautiful a daughter he would not have been so poor, and it may be that these were right, for beautiful daughters are not infrequently a source of considerable expense to their parents, and I fear me that Gasmerilda was no exception to this rule. She had a great passion for rare furs and for opera and lingerie cloaks, and the thousand and one other dainty things that appeal to the heart of beautiful young maidenhood, and it seemed to make no difference how many millions of bushels of corn passed through her father's mill day after day, the returns from the grinding wheels were always thirty or forty dollars a month lower than the total aggregate of Gasmerilda's bills from milliners, furriers, jewelers, and others too numerous to mention. Of course, this thing could not go on indefinitely. There comes a time when even the blindest of creditors will insist upon the liquidation of a miller's account, and the poor man found himself getting deeper and deeper into debt as the months passed along, and was now at last at his wits' ends to devise new excuses for the non-payment of Gasmerilda's indebtedness. Indeed, he had now come to a point where there was but one refuge from the ultimate of financial disaster that should force him into a public declaration of his bankruptcy, and that was to be seen associating in public places with well-known malefactors of great wealth. What awful agony of mind this cost him--for he was an honest miller, as had always been evidenced by his willingness to promise to pay his debts even when he knew he could not--the world will never know, but he swallowed his pride, and for a time gained immunity from the pressure of his creditors with their threatened judgments by being seen walking down Fifth Avenue in the morning alongside of Colonel John W. Midas, the president of the Pactolean Trust Company, a savings institution formed primarily for the purpose of lending its depositors' money to members of its own board of directors, taking their checks dated two months ahead and indorsed by their office-boys and stenographers for security.