“By the coke ovens of hell, it must be that ten thousand dollars!  If I can get that squared, it’ll do the trick.”

Thus, by the commonest artifice of the trade, having gained your interest, the action of the story will now be suspended, leaving you grumpily to consider a sort of dull biography beginning fifteen years before.

When old Jacob was young Jacob he was a breaker boy in a Pennsylvania coal mine.  I don’t know what a breaker boy is; but his occupation seems to be standing by a coal dump with a wan look and a dinner-pail to have his picture taken for magazine articles.  Anyhow, Jacob was one.  But, instead of dying of overwork at nine, and leaving his helpless parents and brothers at the mercy of the union strikers’ reserve fund, he hitched up his galluses, put a dollar or two in a side proposition now and then, and at forty-five was worth $20,000,000.

There now! it’s over.  Hardly had time to yawn, did you?  I’ve seen biographies that—­but let us dissemble.

I want you to consider Jacob Spraggins, Esq., after he had arrived at the seventh stage of his career.  The stages meant are, first, humble origin; second, deserved promotion; third, stockholder; fourth, capitalist; fifth, trust magnate; sixth, rich malefactor; seventh, caliph; eighth, x.  The eighth stage shall be left to the higher mathematics.

At fifty-five Jacob retired from active business.  The income of a czar was still rolling in on him from coal, iron, real estate, oil, railroads, manufactories, and corporations, but none of it touched Jacob’s hands in a raw state.  It was a sterilized increment, carefully cleaned and dusted and fumigated until it arrived at its ultimate stage of untainted, spotless checks in the white fingers of his private secretary.  Jacob built a three-million-dollar palace on a corner lot fronting on Nabob Avenue, city of New Bagdad, and began to feel the mantle of the late H. A. Rashid descending upon him.  Eventually Jacob slipped the mantle under his collar, tied it in a neat four-in-hand, and became a licensed harrier of our Mesopotamian proletariat.

When a man’s income becomes so large that the butcher actually sends him the kind of steak he orders, he begins to think about his soul’s salvation.  Now, the various stages or classes of rich men must not be forgotten.  The capitalist can tell you to a dollar the amount of his wealth.  The trust magnate “estimates” it.  The rich malefactor hands you a cigar and denies that he has bought the P. D. & Q. The caliph merely smiles and talks about Hammerstein and the musical lasses.  There is a record of tremendous altercation at breakfast in a “Where-to-Dine-Well” tavern between a magnate and his wife, the rift within the loot being that the wife calculated their fortune at a figure $3,000,000 higher than did her future divorce.  Oh, well, I, myself, heard a similar quarrel between a man and his wife because he found fifty cents less in his pockets than he thought he had.  After all, we are all human—­Count Tolstoi, R. Fitzsimmons, Peter Pan, and the rest of us.