I have always considered this the most interesting and most unfortunate of all my experiences as a stock operator. As a lesson it cost me a disproportionately high price. It put off the time of my recovery several years. I was young enough to wait with patience for the strayed millions to come back. But five years is a long time for a man to be poor. Young or old, it is not to be relished. I could do without the yachts a great deal easier than I could without a market to come back on. The greatest opportunity of a lifetime was holding before my very nose the purse I had lost. I could not put out my hand and reach for it. A very shrewd boy, that Dan Williamson; as slick as they make them; farsighted, ingenious, daring. He is a thinker, has imagination, detects the vulnerable spot in any man and can plan cold-bloodedly to hit it. He did his own sizing up and soon doped out just what to do to me in order to reduce me to complete inoffensiveness in the market. He did not actually do me out of any money. On the contrary, he was to all appearances extremely nice about it. He loved his sister, Mrs. Marquand, and he did his duty toward her as he saw it. _XIV_ It has always rankled in my mind that after I left Williamson & Brown’s office the cream was off the market. We ran smack into a long moneyless period; four mighty lean years. There was not a penny to be made. As Billy Henriquez once said, “It was the kind of market in which not even a skunk could make a scent.” It looked to me as though I was in Dutch with destiny. It might have been the plan of Providence to chasten me, but really I had not been filled with such pride as called for a fall. I had not committed any of those speculative sins which a trader must expiate on the debtor side of the account. I was not guilty of a typical sucker play. What I had done, or, rather, what I had left undone, was something for which I would have received praise and not blame--north of Forty-second Street. In Wall Street it was absurd and costly. But by far the worst thing about it was the tendency it had to make a man a little less inclined to permit himself human feelings in the ticker district. I left Williamson’s and tried other brokers’ offices. In every one of them I lost money. It served me right, because I was trying to force the market into giving me what it didn’t have to give--to wit, opportunities for making money. I did not find any trouble in getting credit, because those who knew me had faith in me. You can get an idea of how strong their confidence was when I tell you that when I finally stopped trading on credit I owed well over one million dollars.