It is one of the not few drawbacks of riches that they rouse the instinct of cupidity in nearly all human beings. The rich man glances round at a circle of constrained faces, each more or less unsuccessfully striving to veil from him the glistening eye and the watery lip of the gold hunger. Probably you know how pepsin is got for the market--how they pen pigs so that their snouts almost touch food which they can by no straining and struggling reach; how the unhappy creatures soon begin to drip, then to slobber, then to stream into the receiving trough under their jaws the pepsin which the sight of the food starts their stomachs to secreting. As I have looked at the parasite circles of some of my friends I have often been reminded of the pepsin pigs. Some of my friends like these displays, encourage them in every way, associate solely with pepsin pigs. I confess I have never acquired the least taste for that sort of entertainment. I have traveled the world over, and everywhere I have found men either industriously engaged in cringing or looking hopefully about for some one to cringe to them. Well--what of it? I owe Dugdale a debt I cannot hope to repay. He, a light-hearted philosopher, made me light-hearted. He kept my sense of humor and my sense of proportion constantly active. There is a stripe of philosopher of the light-hearted variety who lets his perception of the fundamental futility of life and all that therein is discourage him from everything but cynical laughter at himself and at the world. That sort is a shallow ass, fit company for no one but the bleary, blowsy wrecks to whose level he rapidly sinks. Dugdale--and I--were of the other school. We did not--at least, not habitually--exaggerate our own importance. It caused no swelling of the head in him that his name was known wherever people went to the theater, or in me that I usually had to be taken into account when they did anything important in finance. We did not measure the world or rank its inhabitants according to the silly standards in general use. But at the same time we appreciated that to work and to work well was the only sensible way to pass the few swift years assigned us. It takes a serious man to make even a good joke. A frivolous person can do nothing. That is why so many of our American women, and so many of the men, too, sink into insignificance as soon as the first freshness of youth is gone from them. Youth has charm simply as youth because it seems to be a brilliant promise. When the promise goes to protest the charm vanishes.