"D’you know what you are?" Fred shot at me to-day in a flash of inspiration—he is dowered with a fecundity of flashes these days. "You are the original Old Man Who Lived in a Shoe! It’s the kids that made you get into the game. Gosh! I wish we could get that fact on our letterhead!" With Fred to think of an idiotic notion is to utter and commit it. And I live in constant dread lest some of our customers and clients, a sporadic body as yet, should inquire as to the children with which I know not what to do. Fred is an Elizabethan. In the spacious days he would have ruffed and strutted and wenched and taken chances with careless slashing humor among the best or the worst of them. He is a buccaneer who can throw the dice with jovial laughter when things loom blackest under the very guns of disaster. He is an enigma. He is, in short, my exact opposite. Yet he has made me his partner and accomplice. I used to think myself adamant, but in his hands I am clay. It is now late in March. The cold blasts are often succeeded by genial days of brilliant sunshine that already promise the birth of a new spring. How much I should delight in the flower market near the Laurentian or in walking up the hill toward Fiesole past the fairy-like Florentine villas, or strolling in the Lungarno and across the Ponte Vecchio to San Miniato—to the Pitti—the Uffizi—the gentle air of Fra Angelico’s cloisters—what absurd fancies! ... I am in wintry New York, yoked to a broker, or as the letterhead styles us—Investment Bankers. And though we have received no cables as yet, we are equipped with a fascinating code cable address, which is "Sambyrd!" There is no end to our grandeur. Sambyrd! How it all came about is still swathed in a sort of semi-transparent mystery for me—semi-transparent, for even now I do see one thing clearly: My income was hopelessly inadequate to the rearing of three children and my capital was already invaded. With the capital gone what was there left for me but addressing envelopes, the children in a Home like that which Alicia came from and general collapse and catastrophe! And then there was Fred’s enthusiasm. "Money," said he sententiously, "is a very simple matter. It won’t come rolling to you of its own accord, but you can get it. Every one must find his own way. This is my way—Salmon and Byrd. Will you join me and make it your way, too?" And I, struggling like a fish in a net, like a bird in a snare, like any beast caught in a trap, could discern no way of my own. "But what," I demanded in a sort of despairing indignation, "can I do at that business?" "You can learn," said Fred. "And you’ll be making something before you know it. And as we grow you’ll make more."