It is the way of the world. All struggle to gain wealth. Those that succeed, with but few exceptions, sneer at those who are left behind, and what does it all amount to in the end? One can enjoy it but a few years at most. I have in my career come into more or less intimate contact, socially and in a business way, with many men of great wealth. In some instances, where the wealth was inherited, the past generation had paid the price of its accumulation, but I doubt if any of those who have given up the best of their lives in the struggle to attain their present position and wealth, now that they possess it, get out of it anything like the degree of happiness and contentment that was in evidence in those early years in Knollwood. And what has it cost them? Long years of struggle and worry, continual mental strain that has prevented the full enjoyment of home life, a weakened physical condition, old age in advance of its time, and more, far more than all this, in at least one instance of which I have personal knowledge, and I presume there have been many others, the disruption of a family that would never have occurred had the husband given less time to his struggle for wealth and more to the wife whom he had vowed to love and cherish. She, poor, beautiful woman, left much to herself evening after evening while her husband was at his club or elsewhere planning with allies his huge business operations, fell a victim to a fiend in the guise of a man. When that husband looks at his children, deserted by their mother, he must think that for his millions he has paid a stupendous price. Wealth brings with it fashionable life. Of what horrors the fashionable life of New York is continually giving us examples, the columns of the daily papers bear witness. Is the "game worth the candle"? CHAPTER XIII PROSPEROUS DAYS My business in 1879 returned me nearly sixteen thousand dollars, a satisfactory increase over the previous year. My wife and I had become much attached to "Sunnyside," and as the owner was willing to sell it to us for just what it had cost to build, plus one thousand dollars for the land, we bought it. We then spent eleven hundred dollars in improvements, and when finished our home had cost us sixty-five hundred dollars. It was certainly a very attractive place for that amount of money. To be sure it was only an unpretentious cottage, but a pretty one, and the interior had been so successfully though inexpensively treated in decorations and appointments that the general effect attracted from our friends universal admiration. As our neighbor, Charlie Wood, put it on his first inspection, we had succeeded in making a "silk purse out of a sow's ear." His remark rather grated on us, but it was characteristic of the man and we knew it was simply his way of paying us a compliment.