calling his attention to it.

"Can you raise two thousand dollars?" was asked of him by a friend,
when he was twenty-seven years old. "If you can, I know a first-rate
chance to get into business."

"Indeed! What is the nature of it?"

The friend told him all he knew, and he was satisfied that a better
offering might never present itself. But two thousand dollars were
indispensable.

"Can't you borrow it?" suggested the friend.

"I will try."

"Try your best. You will never again have such an opportunity."

Peyton did try, but in vain. Those who could lend it to him considered
him "too good-hearted a fellow" to trust with money; and he was forced
to see that tide, which if he could have taken it at the flood, would
have led him on to fortune, slowly and steadily recede.

To Merwin the same offer was made. He had fifteen hundred dollars laid
by, and easily procured the balance. No one was afraid to trust him
with money.

"What a fool I have been!" was the mental exclamation of Peyton, when
he learned that his fellow-clerk had been able, with his own earnings,
on a salary no larger than his own, to save enough to embrace the