“Just now,” continued Ellesworth, “I’m working on a thing that I think will be rather a big thing. I shouldn’t want it talked about outside, but it’s a matter of taking hold of the cod fisheries of the Grand Banks,—practically amalgamating them—and perhaps combining with them the entire herring output, and the whole of the sardine catch of the Mediterranean. If it goes through,” he added, “I shall be in a position to let you in on the ground floor.”
I knew the ground floor of old. I have already many friends sitting on it; and others who have fallen through it into the basement.
I said, “thank you,” and he left me.
“That was Ellesworth, wasn’t it?” said a friend of mine who was near me. “Poor devil. I knew him slightly,—always full of some new and wild idea of making money. He was talking to me the other day of the possibility of cornering all the huckleberry crop and making refined sugar. Isn’t it amazing what fool ideas fellows like him are always putting up to business men?”
We both laughed.
After that I didn’t see Ellesworth for some weeks.
Then I met him in the club again. How he paid his fees there I do not know.
This time he was seated among a litter of foreign newspapers with a cup of tea and a ten-cent package of cigarettes beside him.
“Have one of these cigarettes,” he said. “I get them specially. They are milder than what we have in the club here.”
They certainly were.