I bowed and left. Outside was a sign which read: “To New York—twenty miles.” I stood a moment and pondered. Twenty miles expressed a nearness which made Hades a suburb of the metropolis! The call of the city was insistent, the lure of Broadway beckoned to the white lights and the clang of trolleys, but all about me were unfolding the wonders of the unknown Stygian country. I did not dispute the distance, nor did I heed the mute command. I simply turned my back on the sign post and walked away from the imperative pointing finger. “BOSS” TWEED ON TAINTED MONEY, WITH SOME NONSENSE DEFINITIONS OF FADS AND FINANCE. CHAPTER VII. “Boss” Tweed on Tainted Money, with Some Nonsense Definitions of Fads and Finance. The Asbestos Society of Sinners was in session. The subject of debate was, “Resolved that gold may be yellow, but it is not tainted.” “‘An Englishman’s hell is want of money,’” mused Carlyle, repeating what he had said while a denizen of earth. “It’s too bad he gets Hades in both the upper and lower worlds,” observed “Boss” Tweed, who as the reincarnated Dives handled the gavel. “Unfortunately, that condition is not confined to any one country. Wendell Phillips once said that if an American saw a silver dollar on the other side of Hell he would jump for it.” “Is that why you came here?” asked he whose only claim to fame was that an ass had spoken to him. “Baalam’s itchy palm spoiled him for a prophet,” observed Tweed, addressing the chairman, and ignoring that individual. “No, gentlemen, it wasn’t one dollar that brought me here. It was $10,000,000 or $100,000,000; I forget which.” “A cypher more or less makes no difference,” put in Carlyle, cynically. He evidently thought this a side-splitting English joke, for he laughed at his own wit. “That depends whether there is a point back of it,” asserted Dr. Johnson. “Truly these be tainted times, if we can place any dependence in the New York correspondence of the Cimmerian Chatterbox,” volunteered Tweed. “Poor Diagones has had to give up his quest for an honest man: not being in the trust, he cannot buy any oil for his lantern. But even a searchlight wouldn’t help him in these days. An honest man never gets within the rays of the calcium; he is too busy picking the pockets of the people.” “Oil and money will come uppermost at last in the caldron of watered stocks underneath which are the fires of Hell, for both are Standard.” “I don’t see how tainted money can be made from refined oil.” It was Solomon the wise who spoke.