"Dollars, dollars, dollars" beat a tattoo on my ear-drums as the rain used to on the roof at the old farmhouse.
A moment later Manager Thomas of the great hotel slipped up to me. "I'm in for a thousand or two, if you say the word," he whispered. At dinner my old waiter, who I would have sworn did not know a stock certificate from a dog license, bent over respectfully to tell me that twenty of the boys had chipped in and desired me to take their thousand dollars and put it up for two hundred shares—$20,000 worth more. Room Clerk Palmer called over to me as I went by his desk a moment later to say he was going in for three hundred shares if it broke him. And so it went—bell-boys, chambermaids, valets, elevator men, all begging an interview, and all with the same request—"Would I not put their savings into this magic money-maker?"
All were friends or protégés of mine, these managers, clerks, stewards, and waiters. Their money was more sacred to me than my own. I had been instrumental in bringing many of them up to the palace of American dollar royalty from the old Brunswick, and I would rather have lost a finger any day than have jeopardized their savings. For all of them I had but one answer: "Go your limit."
I looked over the memoranda and telegrams piled high on the table in my room, all recording the whirlwind sweep of this tremendous copper movement that I had set a-booming.
"Dollars, dollars, dollars."
Requests from friends for some of the easy money I was dispensing to the public, appeals from old associates for special allotments of the subscription, urgent petitions from capitalists and bankers with whom I had business relations that their bids for shares should have preference, perfumed notes on tinted paper in feminine handwriting begging aid, advice, my influence, on a hundred specious pleas. It seemed to me that