might the more surely swindle in large things. The moral element in a transaction never troubled him at all; its possible legal aspect troubled him much. His logic in all these matters showed the enlargement of his intellect. Why, he said, garrote a capitalist in the street as he is returning home at night from his office? The most that could be gained by such an operation would be a watch and a pocket-book, with danger of being arrested by the police, tried in the courts, and sent to prison for a term of years. Better to garrote him under the full noonday sun by a corner in stocks, and thus deprive him of all his property, without any risk of being called to account for the robbery before any of the tribunals of justice. Morally, of course, the proceeding was identical with that of a sharper, with loaded dice, who allures his victims into games of chance, or of a free-booter who lies in wait at the corner of a road to plunder a stage-coach; but it had the immense advantage over these of being legally safe, and of holding out the promise of a hundredfold more booty. Indeed, he held that the difference between a great operator in stocks and an ordinary thief was the difference between a monarch who makes war to steal the territory of a neighbor and an individual murderer who kills the wayfarer he designs only to plunder. This horrible old spider of speculation experienced a certain grim delight in gazing at the flies as they fell successively into his cunningly spun web, and when he darted out upon them, they were devoured with all the savage and ravenous

glee with which a cannibal devours the ribs and joints of a missionary.

Not the least noticeable peculiarity in Mr. Smith's character was the absence in him of most of those qualities of avarice which we associate with the idea of a miser. He never seemed to gloat over his wealth, but rather gloated over the power it gave him to prey on his less opulent or intelligent fellow-citizens. He pinched and starved his clerks, not so much because he was too mean to give them adequate salaries, but because he wished to demonstrate to them that they were, as long as they chose or were compelled to stay with him, his abject slaves. After his fortune was made, his avarice was concentrated in making himself a money power. As Napoleon only considered one conquest as a step to others, so this creature ruined his competitors in Wall Street to-day, only to form new combinations to ruin fresh competitors to-morrow. He intensely enjoyed, not his wealth, but the means his wealth afforded him of preventing others from acquiring it. Having no heart, his only happiness was in the play of his intellect and the indulgence of his malignant propensities. In studying him, I have been more and more impressed with two things, first, that human life is mercifully limited to seventy or eighty years; and secondly, that old men, divorced from all family connections, with no grandchildren playing about their knees, and with no memories but those which record the triumphs of their greed of power and gain, are apt to be the deadliest enemies

of the human race. Their life has been an enormous failure, however large may be their property; they know the fact when they have become old, however much they have doubted it in their vigorous age; and such men are the real misanthropes of the business world, — human wolves which only the decay of the physical powers prevents from becoming spiritual devils. Mr. Smith was saved from being a devil because the Lord did not accord to him the longevity of Methuselah. He died very respectably, with a number of godly clergymen and philanthropists around his bed. In his will he left all his remaining property to certain rather heretical religious and benevolent associations, not one of which expected the old cynic would give it a dollar, because it had never toadied him. He had a grand burial, indeed, a weeping New York followed his hearse to the tomb. On the next day he was forgotten, except by those he had cheated. The rage of the sect of Christians to which he was nominally attached, and whose ministers had condoned his offences against Christian sentiments and principles in the hope that he would leave his ill-gotten money to its academies and churches, was secretly but not less bitterly expressed. The old man, in making his will, probably anticipated this pious indignation, and chuckled over it with a kind of senile glee. He doubtless thought, in his ironical scorn, that those who had been preaching, for the fifty years he had attended their services, against the devil, would not condescend to accept the

devil's dollars. Certainly every dollar he had earned belonged to the devil rather than to the Lord. As there was no church here on earth which was formally organized in the name of Satan, he probably felt that the best way he could adopt to reach his master was to leave his money to a class of persons he had always abhorred, because they assumed to be reformers, abolitionists, "liberal" Christians, and whom he was taught by his clergyman to consider as little better than atheists on account of defects in their religious creed. He accordingly left his money to them in the hope that they would serve the cause to which he had devoted his life. What would be his rage could he know that the money he had obtained by inflicting suffering was devoted to allaying it,that the devil's money was strictly expended in advancing the cause of the good Lord? Peace to his ashes! I wish I could add, peace to his soul! But alas! in the whole course of his life he never showed that he had any soul.

MR. HARDHACK ON THE DERIVATION OF

MAN FROM THE MONKEY.

I CAN Stand it no longer, sir. I have been seething and boiling inwardly for a couple of years at this last and final insult which science has put upon human nature, and now I must speak, or, if you will, explode. And how is it, I want to know, that the duty of hurling imprecations at this infernal absurdity has devolved upon me? Don't we employ a professional class to look after the interests of the race - fellows heavily feed to see to it that gorilla and chimpanzee keep their distance; paid, sir, by me and you to proclaim that men -ay, and women too - are at the top of things in origin, as well as in nature and destiny? Why are these retained attorneys of humanity so confoundedly cool and philosophical, while humanity is thus outraged? What's the use of their asserting, Sunday after Sunday, that man was made a little lower than the angels, when right under their noses are a set of anatomical miscreants who contend that he is only a little higher than the monkeys? And the thing has now gone so far, that I'll be hanged if it is n't becoming a sign of a narrow and prejudiced mind to scout the idea that we are all descended from mindless beasts. You are a fossilized old fogy, in