At the conclusion of an elaborate affair in New York City, the guests leaned back in their chairs to listen to the singers. The cigarettes were passed around. Oddly enough, the banquet had not been marked until that moment, and, as the host was famous for the unusualness of his dinners, many of the diners were disappointed. Their disappointment gave way to admiration. Each cigarette was rolled, not in white paper, but in a one hundred dollar bill and the initials of the host were engraved in gold letters. This strange conceit was applauded until the voices of the singers struggled amid the uproar. A member of the idle rich rumbled along a Jersey highway in his motor car. He approached an excavation where workmen were manœuvring cranes and hoists. At the side of the road lay a dying horse. It had fallen into a hole and two of its legs were broken. The workmen were waiting for the arrival of a policeman to put the suffering animal to death. “I’ll save that horse,” decided the wealthy motorist. His decision was simply an idle whim. When the policeman came, the motorist had already bought the useless horse for a ten dollar bill. He procured an ambulance and had the animal removed to his own stable. He summoned the foremost veterinarians in New York and the crippled work horse was patched up. For weeks it hung suspended in a sling and finally the broken bones knitted and the horse hobbled about. The veterinarians demanded five thousand dollars for their work and were paid without complaint. In his stoutest days, the saved horse was worth no more than a hundred dollars. A well known metropolitan spender has an annual bill of some ten thousand dollars for shoes alone. His order stands in every manufactory in America and Europe. Whenever a new style of men’s shoes is designed, a sample pair is immediately shipped to him. He cannot possibly wear a tenth of the shoes sent to him, but he has the satisfying knowledge that he is never behind the style. The wife of a Western man owns a pet monkey. The little beast lives in a private room and is constantly attended by a valet. It rides abroad behind its private trotter, has its own outfit of clothes, its dining table, and a bed made of solid ivory, tipped with gold ornaments. All told, perhaps a dozen human beings minister to the comfort of the little simian and the mistress cheerfully pays from ten to fifteen thousand dollars yearly on this one extravagance. She became dissatisfied with the dining service in the monkey-room of her home, and her pet now eats its meals off solid silver plates. At a dinner party given by a notorious millionaire, each guest discovered in one of his oysters a magnificent black pearl. It was a fitting prelude to a sumptuous banquet and it contained an element of surprise. It was said that the dinner cost the giver twenty thousand dollars.