nce upon a time, not many years ago, my children, there was a well-known captain of industry who at his death had no other legacy to leave to his three sons than fourteen bank accounts, all of them overdrawn, a couple of automobiles without any tires on their wheels, and an Angora cat which had taken several prizes at the annual cat show in New York, and upon more than one occasion had had its picture printed in the society columns of the Sunday newspapers.
The eldest son took over the bank accounts, and by the negotiation of several large checks among his friends, each one dated several months ahead, had managed to escape to Venezuela with a comfortable fortune, where, after several revolutions, he found himself in the President's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. He further enriched himself in this office by the private sale of national bonds to innocent investors, prior to his departure for Algiers, and became, before his death, a leading spirit in that interesting colony, and an influential member of the Missionary Society of East Africa.
The second son took the automobiles, and with a pot of paint and eight old life-preservers, relics of the palmy days when his father was a famous yachtsman, so furbished them up that he was able to sell them f. o. b. to a couple of farmers in central Connecticut for five thousand dollars, which he invested in Steel Common when it was sulking along between 10 and 12 on a margin of five per cent., and, selling out at 84-7/8, he was soon able to retire to the serene joys and quiet pleasures of the Great White Way, along whose verdured slopes he pranked and played until paresis called him at the ripe age of twenty-seven years. But to the youngest son, poor Jack Dinwiddie, by the terms of his father's will, fell only the residue of the estate after the two brothers had had their shares; in other words, the Angora cat!
It was, indeed, a melancholy situation, for poor Jack, like a great many other sons of men of presumably large wealth, had studied only political economy at college, and of the domestic variety knew nothing. He was an honorary member of the Consumers' League, but of the methods of the Producers' Union he knew little, and here at the age of twenty-two he found himself fatherless, penniless, and without any visible means of support in the line of earning capacity.
"Well, Puss," he said, gloomily, as he gazed at his Angora cat, who was sitting on top of a pile of unpaid bills in Jack's bachelor apartment, washing his face with his right paw, "it looks to me as if we were up against it. The governor has gone to his last account, my allowance has ceased, and you are the only clear and unencumbered asset in my possession, barring this last cigarette and two matches loaned to me by a kind gentleman upon the street to whom I applied recently for a light."
He paused and lit the cigarette, while Puss, unmindful of the pathos of the situation, continued his prinking, giving especial attention to his whiskers, brushing them upward from his lips until he bore a not very remote resemblance to the Kaiser himself.
"I SUPPOSE I COULD SELL YOU, BILL"