“Let me tell you something, Mr. Stewardson,” said Jerningham, with that curious earnestness people assume when they discuss matters they do not really understand--“let me tell you this: The time is coming--and coming within a few months!--when good, hard gold is going to command a premium just as it practically did during the Bryan free-silver scare in 1896. I am going to save mine. I want to have it in readiness to take advantage of--” “But present conditions are utterly different--” “They are always different--and yet the panics come! You thought that after 1896 there would never again be any need for clearing-house certificates; and yet, in 1907--” “They were unnecessary--” began Stewardson, hotly. He had been left out of all conferences among the powers at that trying time, and naturally disapproved their actions. “But they happened, just the same! I know myself. If I cash in now I'll buy something with the money. I don't want to buy now. No, sir! If I should happen to need a million or two I prefer to borrow it for a few weeks until my next shipment comes in. There will be two millions coming in about the middle of next month. I've sent word to get out as big an output as possible. See? You bet your boots Wall Street is not going to get either my cash or my mines, as they did Colonel Cannon's. You know he was The Mexican copper king' one day and That jackass from Chihuahua' the next! See?” The vice-president looked at him and said “I see!” in a very flattering tone of voice; but in his inmost mind he was thinking that such a thing was precisely what doubtless would happen to Mr. Alfred Jemingham, late of Nome. It is always the extremely suspicious, too-smart-for-you-by-heck! farmer who buys the biggest gold brick. “They'll find out I'll never let them change my name into That blankety-blank-blank from Alaska!'” And Jemingham put on that look of devilish astuteness that buyers of stocks always put on when they buy at top prices. He left the vice-president of the VanTwiller Trust Company and called on the vice-presidents of several other trust companies and banks, and found out that he could borrow, more than three hundred dollars a share on his V.T. stock. And he did--then and there. He impressed the genial philanthropists on whom he called as being a child of Nature--a great big boy playing at being a financier. There was in consequence much smacking of financial lips. It was morsels like this naïve and honest Alaskan miner with the millions that helped to reconcile men to living the Wall Street life. VIII On the day after the _Ruritania_ sailed Ashton Welles, whose first wifeless evening at home had not been pleasant, found on his desk a marked copy of _Society Folk_. These were the four marked paragraphs: