never buy more stocks or bonds than he could pay for, or protect with sufficient margin to carry them through the severest depression. He was a self-made man; he had entered his firm as errand boy, and by sheer force of perseverance, ambition and intellect he rose steadily in usefulness and power until he became sole proprietor of the whole establishment. His prestige and the bulk of his fortune had been made in buying and storing goods when the markets were glutted and prices were low, and holding them till the markets were bare and prices were high. After accumulating large stores it sometimes required a year or more of patient waiting for the readjustment of trade conditions; but never had there been a time when during a given cycle, prices had not been abnormally low and also abnormally high. He reckoned his twenty-five years of this sort of training as a singularly qualifying element of success in buying and selling stocks. This undertaking, like dealing in hides and leather, required forethought, discretion, patience and courage. There was scarcely a two-year period in any decade wherein stocks in general could not be bought reasonably cheap; nor was there a similar period when at some time during the twenty-four months they could not be sold at fairly high prices. Statistics proved this to be almost infallibly true; statistics likewise proved that the preponderance of failures in his own line of business could be traced to injudicious purchases of large stores of merchandise at high prices, with resultant inventory losses. As a merchant he had learned that buying and selling leather and hides at a profit was a matter of forecasting future conditions in the light of past events; and as a student of stock market conditions he learned that a recovery of values _always_ follows a prolonged slump in the price of stocks, and that sure success awaits those who pick the right psychological moments to buy and sell. [Illustration]