"Say, Mr. Dayton," she queried, as she took the last fold in the wrapping paper; "what's the best mine to go into?" "The best mine? Oh, I wouldn't touch one of them if I were you!" "Yes, you would, if you were me! So you might as well tell me a good one or I might make a mistake." She held her head with the air of a princess, while the look of a wood-nymph still dwelt in her shadowy eyes, but words and tone meant "business." "How much money have you got to lose?" "Oh, fifty or a hundred dollars," she said carelessly. Dayton strolled to the door and back again before he answered. He was annoyed with Mrs. Jim for placing him in such a position, but he did not see his way out of it. The next man she asked might be a sharper. His ideas of woman's "sphere" were almost mediaeval, but somehow they did not seem to fit Mrs. Jim's case. "Well," he said at last with evident reluctance; "the 'Horn of Plenty' doesn't seem to be any worse than the others, and it may be a grain better. But it's all a gamble, just like roulette or faro, and I should think you had better keep out of it altogether." The "Horn of Plenty"! It was a name to appeal to the most sluggish imagination; the mere sound of it filled Marietta with a joyful confidence. Within the hour she had hailed a passing broker and negotiated with him for five hundred shares of the stock at twenty cents a share. It was not without a strange pang, to be sure, that she wrote out her check for the amount; for just as she was signing her name the unwelcome thought crossed her mind that the person who was selling that amount of stock for a hundred dollars must believe that sum of money to be a more desirable possession than the stock! She felt the meaning of the situation very keenly, but she did not betray her misgivings. As she finished the scrawling signature she only lifted her head with a defiant look, and said: "If anybody tells Jim, I'll _chew 'em up_!" Inches, the broker, thus admonished, only laughed. Indeed, the thing Inches admired most in Mrs. Jim was her forcible manner of expressing herself. He admired and liked her well enough, for that and for other reasons, to take a very disinterested pleasure in putting her in the way of turning an honest penny. The broker's faith in the "Horn of Plenty" was almost as implicit as Marietta's own, and it was with no little pride that he brought the certificate in to her the following day, and unfolded it to her dazzled contemplation. It was a very beauteous production done in green and gold, the design being suggestive and encouraging. It represented a woman clad in green, pointing with a magic golden wand in her left hand toward a group of toiling green miners, while from a golden cornucopia in her right she poured a shower of gold upon an already portentous pyramid of that valuable metal, planted upon a green field.