yield? He wrote because he could not speak. The cancer in his throat had done its work—in intolerable pain the book had been written—month after month it had been a day and night race between the soldier and death—the grave was in sight, now, but the soldier who had never lost a fight had won. He had won, but he had to ask his question with his pencil, for the voice had fallen silent which had said so many inspiring things when the clouds hung low upon the spirits of his countrymen, and the voice which had never failed in its uplifting office since the day that it first made itself heard in the country’s struggle for its life—that day that it dictated those words that revealed to this nation that there was a man risen up at the front, and that the day of vacillation and timidity and compromise was at an end in at least one of the country’s thousand camps—“the only terms are—unconditional surrender.”
[PICTURE OF GRANT SITTING IN HIS WRAPS. GET IT FROM THE ENGRAVING IN THE “ C ENTURY . ”] HOUSE RISE .
MUSIC.
But we do not need to lament for him. He did his mighty work, he died his noble death, and his name will live forever.
[PICTURE OF TOMB.]
I could answer his question without guessing. I already knew. I told him that his profit upon the orders already sent in by the General Agents and secured by safe bonds, would be $320,000. He was satisfied. As it turned out, his share of the profits was far and away beyond that. My firm’s cash profit was $130,000; but by tact, perseverance, watchfulness and sagacity in discovering the right opportunities during 18 careful months they managed to waste it all and get in debt. Eighteen months. As a financial achievement, by people entirely unacquainted with finance, it does not need to hang its head in the presence of anything of the kind that has happened in the American history of that great science.
By continued caution, tact, watchfulness and inspired financiering, during the next 7 years, the firm was able to retire from business in debt—if my wife and I may be counted in with the other creditors—in debt $208,000 above the assets. However, my wife and I don’t have to be paid, so that reduces the debt a good deal more than half. Nothing has to be paid but the rest of the debt; and here I stand, nobly paying it—out of your pockets. That is the way with debts; they just dump along, from shoulder to shoulder, and you never know who has got to foot the bill at last.
CONVERSATIONS WITH SATAN
I t was being whispered around that Satan was in Vienna incognito, and the thought came into my mind that it would be a great happiness to me if I could have the privilege of interviewing him. “When you think of the Devil” he appears, you know. It was past midnight, I was standing at the window of my work-room high aloft on the third floor of the hotel, and was looking down upon a stage-setting which is always effective and impressive at that late hour: the great vacant stone-paved square of the Morzin Platz with its sleeping file of cab-horses and drivers counterfeiting the stillness and solemnity of death; and beyond the square a broad Milky Way of innumerable lamps bending around the far-reaching curve of the Donau canal, with not a suggestion of life or motion visible anywhere under that glinting belt from end to end. If the square and the curve were dim or dark, the impressiveness would be wanting; but the multitudinous lights seem to belong properly with life and energy and the roar and tumult of traffic, and these being now wholly absent, the resulting impression conveyed to the spirit is that they have been suddenly and mysteriously annihilated, and that this brooding midnight silence and solemnity are the signs and symbols of the tragedy that has happened.
Now, with a most strange suddenness came an inky darkness, with a stormy rush of wind, a crash of thunder and a glare of lightning; and the glare vividly