I presume, on a Carnegie or Rockefeller rating; and, at the time which I am about to recall, while already famous and comparatively prosperous, he had not attained that security of position which is happily his today.  Well, I suppose it was some twelve or fifteen years ago—­and of course I am only recalling a story well known to all the world—­that, chancing to be in London, and wishing to send a surprise message to a lady in Chicago who afterward became his wife, he conceived the idea of sending it by messenger boy from Charing Cross to Michigan Avenue; and so the little lad, in the well-known uniform of hurry, sped across the sea, as casually as though he were on an errand from Charing Cross to Chancery Lane, raced across nearly half the continent, as casually as though he were on an errand from Wall Street to Park Row, and finding the proper number in Michigan Avenue, placed the far travelled letter in the lady’s hand, no doubt casually asking for a receipt.  This I consider one of the most romantic compliments ever paid by a lover to his lady.  What millionaire ever had a fancy like that?

Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this?  There was living in New York some ten years ago a charming actor, not unknown to the public and much loved by his friends for, among his other qualities, his quaint whims.  Good actor as he was, like many other good actors he was usually out of an engagement, and he was invariably poor.  It was always his poorest moment that he would choose for the indulgence of an odd, and surely kindly, eccentricity.  He would half starve himself, go without drinks, forswear tobacco, deny himself car fares, till at last he had saved up five dollars.  This by no means easy feat accomplished, he would have his five-dollar bill changed into five hundred pennies, filling his pockets with which, he would sally forth from his lodging, and, seeking neighbourhoods in which children most abound, he would scatter his arduously accumulated largess among the scrambling boys and girls, literally happy as a king to watch the glee on the young faces at the miraculous windfall.  We often wondered that he was not arrested for creating a riot in the public streets, a disturber of the public traffic.  Had some millionaire passed by on one of those ecstatic occasions, there is no question but that he would have been promptly removed to Bellevue as a dangerous lunatic.

Or what millionaire ever had a fancy like this?  Passing along Forty-second Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely.  The old man was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply pitiful for all that.  He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly he was very unhappy—­unhappy over some mysterious something that one or two kindly