Like all men born to live in the country, I have ever had the habit of trusting fair-spoken men. This has resulted to my disadvantage many times, but on the whole I have not been the loser by it. For the goose is bound to be plucked, and is none the worse for it in the end, while the feathers the rogue scatters along his path serve in some measure to indicate his whereabouts afterward to the trusting and simple-minded. In my youth I was disregardful of money, and thus early acquired credit for generosity that did not belong to me. Because of this I have always believed that merit in giving ought to attach only to those who do so with groans and contractions of the heartstrings. For such to give is real generosity, and in this regard it is a subject of gratitude to me, as it must be to all improvident men, that with the lapse of years and the coming on of old age, no untoward circumstance of poverty has caused me to regret any foolish thing I may have done in disregard of matters relating to money; and about the possession of this last there exists much misunderstanding, I have always thought. For I must say, that for the life of me I have never been able to discover that money is more prized among the trading-people with whom my life has been thrown than among the better bred of other communities. In whomsoever wealth dwells, to that person the social peacock and the common barnyard fowl alike droop their crests in respectful and distant salutation. Love of property is innate in man, and to that love we may trace most of the blessings we have above those of common savages. About this, however, men differ; but all agree that those who have little defer of their own accord to those who have more, and that so long as men have vigor and the hope of life their greed of property never ceases to grow. In my own case, lack of skill in getting and holding has been said by those who professed to understand such matters to be clearly indicated by my temperament. This prediction may have been true, though it has always been a conviction with me that if I had devoted myself to making money with proper spirit I might have been fairly successful. In this, however, I may be vain without reason, but in order to acquire and keep, one’s thoughts, it is clear, must dwell much upon such subjects. Out of this concentration comes the gift of acquiring and holding, the genius of the money-getter. Such occupation of one’s life many esteem uneventful and void of interest, but I am assured that it is more intense than the habit of gambling or the love of women; indeed, a passion so great that it eats up all others, and in its intensity is worthy to rank with the fanaticism of martyrs, the ambition of soldiers, the fierce egotism of artists, or the dry nervous disorder of writers. *CHAPTER III* *THE WRECK*