My wife, unknown to me and in hope of helping me over the hard spot, wrote to Mr. Viedler, asking him for a loan of a few hundred dollars. He never replied to her letter. Then she wrote to Charlie Wood. From him came a reply, that if I had not read it, I would never have believed him capable of writing. It was the first wickedly cruel blow dealt me by one whom I regarded as a warm personal friend, and the cruelty was vastly accentuated by dealing it through my wife. In his letter he gave as a reason for not making the loan that I had caused him to lose fifty thousand dollars--that as a result he had been compelled to pay for his home, recently completed, and one of the handsomest in Orange, New Jersey, in part by mortgage; further, in writing, he went out of his way to express himself, with an ability for which he is noted, in most unkind and bitter terms. Here are the facts: At our first interview after my failure I said, "Charlie, I am sorry for your loss." To which he replied, "Walter, you do not owe me a cent." He had invested with us fifty-four thousand dollars, but he had drawn in profits thirty-two thousand, so that his actual loss was but twenty-two thousand dollars. In 1890, _only two weeks_ after he had declined to share with me that small investment in the Connecticut concern to benefit the estate of his deceased partner, because he "could not go into any outside investment," he came to my office and asked me to take eighteen thousand dollars, to be--and was--later increased, for operations in our market. I took it, not that I wanted it, but for the reason that he was a friend who asked me to help him and as was the case with every such investment, except Caine's, it was distinctly understood that the risk of loss was the investor's. When I negotiated the sale of this man's interest in those properties to Mallison I secured him at least twenty-five thousand dollars more than he expected or could have gotten himself, and it was on that occasion his wife exclaimed, "Oh, Walter, what a friend you have been"! He also was one of those investors whom I relieved from being held as an undisclosed partner at the time of my failure--_and this man was my friend!_ To the letter he had written to my wife I replied, resenting indignantly the falsity and injustice of his charges and offering the vouchers to prove my statements. His answer was conciliatory, and admitted that "the facts were really much better" than he supposed. In those days I thought often of the many I had assisted in the past and wondered if the "bread cast upon the waters would return to me after many days" Of course I did occasionally find a friend who helped a little, but these were few and far between.