It was not long before he invited me to lunch with him and I took every opportunity to impress him with my legal acumen.  He had a lawyer of his own already, but I soon saw that the impression I was making would have the effect I desired; and presently, as I had confidently expected, he gave me a small legal matter to attend to.  Needless to say it was accomplished with care, celerity and success.  He gave me another.  For six months I dogged that old German’s steps every day from one o’clock in the afternoon until twelve at night.  I walked, talked, drank beer and played pinochle with him, sat in his library in the evenings, and took him and his wife to the theater.

At the end of that period he discharged his former attorney and retained me.  The business was easily worth thirty-five hundred dollars a year, and within a short time the Chicle Trust bought out his interests and I became a director in it and one of its attorneys.

I had already severed my connection with the firm and had opened an office of my own.  Among the directors in the trust with whom I was thrown were a couple of rich young men whose fathers had put them on the board merely for purposes of representation.  These I cultivated with the same assiduity as I had used with the German.  I spent my entire time gunning for big game.  I went after the elephants and let the sparrows go.  It was only a month or so before my acquaintance with these two boys—­for they were little else—­had ripened into friendship.  My wife and I were invited to visit at their houses and I was placed in contact with their fathers.  From these I soon began to get business.  I have kept it—­kept it to myself.  I have no real partners to steal it away from me.

I am now the same kind of lawyer as the two men who composed the firm for which I slaved at a hundred dollars a month.  I find the work for my employees to do.  I am now an exploiter of labor.  It is hardly necessary for me to detail the steps by which I gradually acquired what is known as a gilt-edged practice; but it was not by virtue of my legal abilities, though they are as good as the average.  I got it by putting myself in the eye of rich people in every way open to me.  I even joined a fashionable church—­it pains me to write this—­for the sole purpose of becoming a member of the vestry and thus meeting on an intimate footing the half-dozen millionaire merchants who composed it.  One of them gave me his business, made me his trustee and executor; and then I resigned from the vestry.

I always made myself persona grata to those who could help me along, wore the best clothes I could buy, never associated with shabby people, and appeared as much as possible in the company of my financial betters.  It was the easier for me to do this because my name was not Irish, German or Hebraic.  I had a good appearance, manners and an agreeable gloss of culture and refinement.  I was tactful, considerate, and tried to strike a personal note in my intercourse with people who were worth while; in fact I made it a practice—­and still do so—­to send little mementos to my newer acquaintances—­a book or some such trifle—­with a line expressing my pleasure at having met them.