Three million dollars! Suggestive of mighty air-castles, of untold grandeur, of matchless liberality to the poor and needy! Suggestive, also, of long and weary years of patient seeking after worldly wealth, of painful struggles with adverse circumstances, and of parsimonious self-denial extending even to the very necessities of life. There had been three great epochs in the life of John Hungerford, the Baltimore _millionnaire_, at each of which he had annexed a zero to the number indicating his worldly wealth; and it must also be said that he was continually adding zeros to the sum total of his moral and spiritual possessions. When he commenced his business career, he had three thousand dollars. Operating with care and prudence, it required twenty years to annex the first zero, and he was forty-one when the first financial cycle was completed. Another twenty years of care and toil annexed the second zero, and John Hungerford was more than threescore. Then fortune, always constant, became lavish, and the very skies seemed to rain down wealth. His real estate doubled, tripled, and quadrupled, and ten years placed the third and last zero against the accumulations of his lifetime. Then, having passed his threescore years and ten, he retired from active business with fear and trembling for the stupendous fortune he had made. Only three years more of life were vouchsafed to him; but one with his simple habits could not spend a tithe of his income, and another half million was added, almost in spite of himself. Wherefore had John Hungerford struggled so patiently with the tide of fortune? Wherefore had he neglected his body and his soul for fifty long years? Wherefore had he lived in a mean house, upon the coarsest fare, with never a horse, and hardly a servant to ease his toilsome but successful march up to the pinnacle of his worldly ambition? He had not a child to inherit his hard-earned gains. He had no friends but those who had been constant to him in business relations, and they never crossed the threshold of his homely dwelling. Nothing but the love of wealth could have sustained him in his fierce struggles for the mammon of the world. Yet John Hungerford was not a bad man. He had cheated no one; had never wronged the widow and the fatherless. He had no friends, because he wanted none; his blood relations had long ago ceased to darken his doors, feeling that they were not welcome guests. They were few in number, including only the son and daughter of his only brother, for the Baltimore _millionnaire_ could boast of no long line of ancestors, and the family tree, so far as his knowledge extended, had its root in the preceding generation.