There is a great deal in starting right, whatever the enterprise may be, and I did very well after my Bethlehem deal--so well, indeed, that you would not have believed it was the selfsame man trading. As a matter of fact I wasn’t the same man, for where I had been harassed and wrong I was now at ease and right. There were no creditors to annoy and no lack of funds to interfere with my thinking or with my listening to the truthful voice of experience, and so I was winning right along. All of a sudden, as I was on my way to a sure fortune, we had the _Lusitania_ break. Every once in a while a man gets a crack like that in the solar plexus, probably that he may be reminded of the sad fact that no human being can be so uniformly right on the market as to be beyond the reach of unprofitable accidents. I have heard people say that no professional speculator need have been hit very hard by the news of the torpedoing of the _Lusitania_, and they go on to tell how they had it long before the Street did. I was not clever enough to escape by means of advance information, and all I can tell you is that on account of what I lost through the _Lusitania_ break and one or two other reverses that I wasn’t wise enough to foresee, I found myself at the end of 1915 with a balance at my brokers’ of about one hundred and forty thousand dollars. That was all I actually made, though I was consistently right on the market throughout the greater part of the year. I did much better during the following year. I was very lucky. I was rampantly bullish in a wild bull market. Things were certainly coming my way so that there wasn’t anything to do but to make money. It made me remember a saying of the late H. H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, to the effect that there were times when a man could no more help making money than he could help getting wet if he went out in a rainstorm without an umbrella. It was the most clearly defined bull market we ever had. It was plain to everybody that the Allied purchases of all kinds of supplies here made the United States the most prosperous nation in the world. We had all the things that no one else had for sale, and we were fast getting all the cash in the world. I mean that the wide world’s gold was pouring into this country in torrents. Inflation was inevitable, and, of course, that meant rising prices for everything.