"He paused, and seemed to be puzzling it out. Then he smiled knowingly,
and said he thought he understood what I meant. It was very kind of me.
He should put every dollar he possessed in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate
Company.

"He rose (with difficulty) to go. I stopped him. I knew, as certainly
as I knew the sun would rise the next morning, that whichever company I
advised him, or he persisted in thinking I had advised him (which was the
same thing), to invest in, would, sooner or later, come to smash. My
grandmother had all her little fortune in the Terra del Fuego Nitrate
Company. I could not see her brought to penury in her old age. As for
Josiah, it could make no difference to him whatever. He would lose his
money in any event. I advised him to invest in Union Pacific Bank
Shares. He went and did it.

"The Union Pacific Bank held out for eighteen months. Then it began to
totter. The financial world stood bewildered. It had always been
reckoned one of the safest banks in the country. People asked what could
be the cause. I knew well enough, but I did not tell.

"The Bank made a gallant fight, but the hand of fate was upon it. At the
end of another nine months the crash came.

"(Nitrates, it need hardly be said, had all this time been going up by
leaps and bounds. My grandmother died worth a million dollars, and left
the whole of it to a charity. Had she known how I had saved her from
ruin, she might have been more grateful.)

"A few days after the failure of the Bank, Josiah arrived on my doorstep;