the entrance-hall of a great hotel that the impecunious can really see with their own eyes, and properly understand, what great riches can actually do for their possessor. What can confer happiness more solid, more satisfying, more abiding, than to buy your wife a costume for two hundred guineas, and to live in such a hotel as this, with the whole treasures of London lying at your feet, and waiting for your choice? About half-past four, when the crush of arrivals was greatest, and the talk in the hall was loudest, another carriage and pair deposited at the hotel an elderly couple. The man was tall and thin; his features were plain, but strongly marked; his hair was grey, and his beard, which he grew behind his chin, was also grey. You may see men like him in face and figure, and in the disposition of his beard behind his chin, in every Yorkshire town--in fact, he was a Yorkshireman by birth, though he had spent the last forty years of his life in the Western States. His face was habitually grave; he spoke slowly. This man, in fact, was one of that most envied and enviable class--the rich American. In those lists which people like so much to read, the name of John Haveril was generally placed about halfway down, opposite the imposing figures 13,000,000 dollars. Reading these figures, the ordinary average Briton remarked, "Dollars, sir; dollars. Not pounds sterling. But still, two millions and a half sterling. And still rolling, still r-r-r-rolling!" The city magnate, reading them, sighs and says, "He cannot spend a quarter of the income. The rest fructifies, sir--fr-r-r-ructifies!" John Haveril arrived at this pinnacle of greatness by methods which I believe are perfectly well understood by everybody who is interested in the great mystery of making money. It is a mystery which is intelligible, easy, and open to everybody. Yet only a very few--say, one in twenty millions--are able to practise the art successfully. A vast number try to cross that stormy sea which has no chart by which they can navigate their barques; rocks strike upon them and overwhelm them; hurricanes capsize and sink them. Disappointment, bankruptcy, concealment for life, flight, ruin, cruel misrepresentation, even open trial, conviction, sentence, and imprisonment are too often the consequences when persons who, perhaps, possess every quality except one--or all the qualities but one or two--in imperfection. Corners, rings, trusts, presidencies, the control of markets, monopolies, the crushing of competition, the trampling down of the weaker, disregard of scruple, tenderness, pity, sympathy, belong to the success which ought to have made John Haveril happy.