the Misses Arbuser; it was always a gay company, and in whatever harbor it dropped anchor there was a new impetus given to the somewhat languid pleasure of the summer season.  We read of the dinners and lunches on board, the entertainments where there were wine and dancing and moonlight, and all that.  I always thought of it as a fairy sort of ship, sailing on summer seas, freighted with youth and beauty, and carrying pleasure and good-fortune wherever it went.  What more pleasing spectacle than this in a world that has such a bad name for want and misery?

Henderson was master of the situation.  The sudden accumulation of millions of money is a mystery to most people.  If Henderson had been asked about it he would have said that he had not a dollar which he had not earned by hard work.  None worked harder.  If simple industry is a virtue, he would have been an example for Sunday-school children.  The object of life being to make money, he would have been a perfect example.  What an inspiration, indeed, for all poor boys were the names of Hollowell and Henderson, which were as familiar as the name of the President!  There was much speculation as to the amount of Henderson’s fortune, and many wild estimates of it, but by common consent he was one of the three or four great capitalists.  The gauge of this was his power, and the amounts he could command in an emergency.  There was a mystery in the very fact that the amount he could command was unknown.  I have said that his accumulation was sudden; it was probably so only in appearance.  For a dozen years, by operations, various, secret, untiring, he had been laying the foundations for his success, and in the maturing of his schemes it became apparent how vast his transactions had been.  For years he had been known as a rising man, and suddenly he became an important man.  The telegraph, the newspapers, chronicled his every movement; whatever he said was construed like a Delphic oracle.  The smile or the frown of Jay Hawker himself had not a greater effect upon the market.  The Southwest operation, which made so much noise in the courts, was merely an incident.  In the lives of many successful men there are such incidents, which they do not care to have inquired into, turning-points that one slides over in the subsequent gilded biography, or, as it is called, the nickel-plated biography.  The uncomfortable A. and B. bondholders had been settled with and silenced, after a fashion.  In the end, Mrs. Fletcher had received from the company nearly the full amount of her investment.  I always thought this was due to Margaret, but I made no inquiries.  There were many people who had no confidence in Henderson, but generally his popularity was not much affected, and whatever was said of him in private, his social position was almost as unchallenged as his financial.  It was a great point in his favor that he was very generous to his family and his friends, and his public charities began to be talked of.  Nothing could