Alone, with set teeth and drooping eyes, George Henry began his task. It was the old, old story. Bills of long standing, threats of suits, letters from collecting agencies, red papers, blue, cream and straw-colored--how he hated them all! Suddenly he came upon a new letter, a square, thick, well addressed letter of unmistakable respectability. "Can it be an invitation?" said George Henry, his heart beating. He opened the sturdy envelope and read the words it had enclosed. Then he leaned back, very still, in his chair, with his eyes shut. His heart bled over what he had suffered. "Had" suffered--yes, that was right, for it was all a thing of the past. The letter made it clear that he was comparatively a rich man. That was all. It was the despised--but not altogether despised, since he had thought of making it his home--poplar land in Michigan. The poplar supply is limited, and paper-mills have capacious maws. Prices of raw material had gone up, and the poplar hunters had found George Henry's land the most valuable to them in the region. A syndicate offered him one hundred dollars an acre for the tract. Joy failed to kill George Henry Harrison. It stunned him somewhat, but he showed wonderful recuperative powers. As he ate a free-lunch after a five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes cracked. His demeanor when he called upon an attorney, a former friend, was quite that of an American gentleman perfectly at his ease. Within a few days George Henry Harrison had deposited to his credit in bank the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, minus the slight cost of certain immediate personal requirements. Then one morning he stalked over to his little office, now clean and natty. He leaned back in his chair again and devoted himself to thinking, the persons on whom his mind dwelt being his creditors. The proper title for the brief account which follows should be The Feast of the Paying of Bills. Here was a man who had suffered, here was a man who had come to doubt himself, and who had now become suddenly and arrogantly independent. His creditors, he knew, were hopeless. That he had so few lawsuits to meet was only because those to whom he owed money had reasoned that the cost of collection would more than offset the sum gained in the end from this man, who had, they thought, no real property behind him. Their attitude had become contemptuous. Now he stood forth defiant and jaunty.