But Wall Street fascinated him. Everything there was done upon such a lavish scale that it just suited him. So instead of taking a vacation he plunged into the market, and his winnings at first were enormous. During the next two years he cleared nine million dollars. Then he went into a wheat corner, and before he got out again he was squeezed dry, and a million and a half in debt.
Turning Failure into Success.
He fought the old San Francisco fight over again and he manifested the same old San Francisco courage.
They had pushed him down to such a point that he could no longer afford to live in New York, and he hired a little house in the suburbs. A cab was a luxury that was not to be thought of, and so every day, pleasant or stormy, Keene walked from the cars to his office. His lunch, and sometimes his dinner, consisted of fruit bought from a basket.
Around him were scores of men reduced to a similar pass, and most of them lost courage and drifted down and out. Courage was the only thing Keene did not lose. He hung on tight, and his former experience enabled him slowly to recover the position he had lost. Little by little, he got on to his feet, and when once he had wiped out his debts he began the fight again on a big scale, and has managed to make himself one of the richest men in the country.
The Tapestried Chamber.
By SIR WALTER SCOTT.
This tale by Sir Walter Scott is justly reckoned among the most effective ghost stories ever written. Its art lies in its perfect simplicity, which for the moment convinces the reader of its truth and therefore makes the horror of it intensely real. Scott had himself a strain of superstition in his nature, derived in part from his Scottish ancestry and heightened by the strange stories and gruesome legends which had been told him by the peasants around whose fires he had sat at night while still a boy.
His belief in the supernatural appears and reappears in many of his most famous novels, as in the episode of the Gray Specter in "Waverley," the second-sight of Meg Merrilies in "Guy Mannering," and the weird figure of Norna of the Fitful Head in "The Pirate." But no better example can be found of Scott's command of the mysterious as an element in fiction than this short story of "The Tapestried Chamber."