CHESTNUT-BURR IX—BILL NYE DESCANTS UPON YOUNG IVES'S IDEAS IN FINANCE.
Mr. Ives's Earnest Desire Not to Tell a Lie or Anything Else—Blighted Powers of Recalling the Past Put Him Alongside the Gentle Gould Himself—Touching Letter Received from a Patron of His Road.
The present age may be regarded as the age of investigation. This morbid curiosity on the part of the American people to know how large fortunes are acquired is a healthy sign, and the desire of the press, as well as the people, to investigate the parlor magic and funny business by which a man can buy two millions of dollars' worth of stock in the Aurora Borealis without paying for it, stick a quill in it and inflate the stock to twenty millions, then borrow thirty-five millions on the new stock by booming it, make an assignment, bust and slide a fifty-pound ledger up his sleeve, is most gratifying.
For the benefit and entertainment of those who still believe that the Sunday paper is not an engine of destruction, and for the consideration of those who may have been kept away from church on this summer Sabbath morning by sickness or insomnia, let us turn for a moment to the thoughtful scrutiny of Mr. Henry S. Ives, the young Napoleon of Wall street.
In the first place, Mr. Ives has done nothing new. Starting out, no doubt, with Mr. Gould as his model, he has kept up the imitation even to the loss of memory and blighted powers of recalling the past during an investigation. (I use Mr. Gould's name simply as an illustration—for I have no special antipathy toward Mr. Gould.) Personally we are friendly. He made his money by means of his comatose memory and flabby integrity, while I made mine by means of earnest, honest toil, and a lurid imagination.
But in the case of Mr. Ives, the gentle, polite failure to remember, the earnest desire not to tell a lie or anything else, the courteous and unobtrusive effort to avoid being too positive about anything that would assist anybody in ascertaining anything—all, all remind the close student of Mr. Jay Gould. The conversation during the investigation for one day ran something like this:
"Mr. Ives, did you in making your assignment turn over all the books connected with your business?"
"Do you mean my library?"
"No; the books of account, the daybook, cash book, ledger, etc., etc."
"Oh!"