pregnant bearing on the proposition—is the "one man" honest, especially as I was equipped with additional documents to offset further attempts on the part of the insurance companies to show me up as a disappointed seeker after their policies?
Here, specifically, are the details of my encounter with the life-insurance institutions, and I pledge my word to my readers that they constitute all the facts in this connection. They are well known to the prominent men associated with the great companies whose duty it is to keep track of just such transactions. Whoever knows by experience of the incessant pursuit of business by the important insurance corporations need not be told that a man in my position has had his share of importuning by agents great and small. I have never sought life insurance, for it has not appealed to me as an investment, but on three separate occasions I have yielded to the persuasions of a friend connected with one of the big institutions and have considered the subject. The first time was in 1887, following a breakdown from overwork. This illness my friend used as an argument to induce me to take out insurance, and I went so far as to agree to submit to a private medical examination by the leading physicians of his company for the purpose of ascertaining if my breakdown, which for a brief time had left a trace of paralysis in my left side, would bar me. This examination was at my own expense, and it was expressly understood that, being private, it should not constitute a record. The physician pronounced me a perfect risk, but advised against going further inasmuch as a rigid rule of the company precluded them from granting insurance to any one who had suffered from