“There is one I might give you,” responded the Jolly Doctor. “It is of a horse-race like that Rescue of Connelly you related and was told me by an old friend and patient who I fear was a trifle wild as a youth. This is the story as set forth by himself, and for want of a more impressive title, we may call it ‘How Prince Rupert Lost.’” CHAPTER XXII.--HOW PRINCE RUPERT LOST. And now I’ll tell you how I once threw stones at Hartford and thereby gained queer money to carry me to the bedside of my mother at her death. My father, you should know, was a lawyer of eminence and wide practice at the New York bar. His income was magnificent; yet--thriftless and well living--he spent it with both hands. My mother, who took as little concern for the future as himself, aided pleasantly in scattering the dollars as fast as they were earned. With no original estate on either side, and not a shilling saved, it was to be expected that my father’s death should leave us wanting a penny. I was twenty-two when the blow fell; he died stricken of an apoplexy, his full habit and want of physical exercise marking him to that malady as a certain prey. I well recall how this death came upon us as a bolt from the blue. And while his partner stood over our affairs like a brother, when the debts were paid there remained no more than would manage an annuity for my mother of some six hundred dollars. With that she retreated to Westchester and lived the little balance of her years with a maiden sister who owned a starved farm, all chequered of stone fences, in that region of breath-taking hills. It stood my misfortune that I was bred as the son of a wealthy man. Columbia was my school and the generosity of my father gilded those college days with an allowance of five thousand a year. I became proficient--like many another hare-brain--in everything save books, and was a notable guard on the University Eleven and pulled the bow oar in the University Eight. When I came from college the year before my father’s death I could write myself adept of a score of sciences, each physical, not one of which might serve to bring a splinter of return--not one, indeed, that did not demand the possession of largest wealth in its pursuit. I was poor in that I did not have a dollar when brought to face the world; I was doubly poor with a training that had taught me to spend thousands. Therefore, during the eighteen years to succeed my father’s going, was I tossed on the waves of existence like so much wreckage; and that I am not still so thrown about is the offspring of happy exigency rather than a condition due to wisdom of my own.