wagon and drove east a hundred miles before we recovered our presence of intellect.  Twenty-five thousand dollars doesn’t sound like so much when you’re reading the annual report of the Pennsylvania Railroad or listening to an actor talking about his salary; but when you can raise up a wagon sheet and kick around your bootheel and hear every one of ’em ring against another it makes you feel like you was a night-and-day bank with the clock striking twelve.

“The third day out we drove into one of the most specious and tidy little towns that Nature or Rand and McNally ever turned out.  It was in the foothills, and mitigated with trees and flowers and about 2,000 head of cordial and dilatory inhabitants.  The town seemed to be called Floresville, and Nature had not contaminated it with many railroads, fleas or Eastern tourists.

“Me and Andy deposited our money to the credit of Peters and Tucker in the Esperanza Savings Bank, and got rooms at the Skyview Hotel.  After supper we lit up, and sat out on the gallery and smoked.  Then was when the philanthropy idea struck me.  I suppose every grafter gets it sometime.

“When a man swindles the public out of a certain amount he begins to get scared and wants to return part of it.  And if you’ll watch close and notice the way his charity runs you’ll see that he tries to restore it to the same people he got it from.  As a hydrostatical case, take, let’s say, A. A made his millions selling oil to poor students who sit up nights studying political economy and methods for regulating the trusts.  So, back to the universities and colleges goes his conscience dollars.

“There’s B got his from the common laboring man that works with his hands and tools.  How’s he to get some of the remorse fund back into their overalls?

“‘Aha!’ says B, ’I’ll do it in the name of Education.  I’ve skinned the laboring man,’ says he to himself, ’but, according to the old proverb, “Charity covers a multitude of skins."’

“So he puts up eighty million dollars’ worth of libraries; and the boys with the dinner pail that builds ’em gets the benefit.

“‘Where’s the books?’ asks the reading public.

“‘I dinna ken,’ says B.  ’I offered ye libraries; and there they are.  I suppose if I’d given ye preferred steel trust stock instead ye’d have wanted the water in it set out in cut glass decanters.  Hoot, for ye!’

“But, as I said, the owning of so much money was beginning to give me philanthropitis.  It was the first time me and Andy had ever made a pile big enough to make us stop and think how we got it.

“‘Andy,’ says I, ’we’re wealthy—­not beyond the dreams of average; but in our humble way we are comparatively as rich as Greasers.  I feel as if I’d like to do something for as well as to humanity.’

“‘I was thinking the same thing, Jeff,’ says he.  ’We’ve been gouging the public for a long time with all kinds of little schemes from selling self-igniting celluloid collars to flooding Georgia with Hoke Smith presidential campaign buttons.  I’d like, myself, to hedge a bet or two in the graft game if I could do it without actually banging the cymbalines in the Salvation Army or teaching a bible class by the Bertillon system.