Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock Read Free Book Online

complaint as the rest of Dr. Slyder’s patients on Plutoria Avenue, and was to be treated in the same way. Dr. Slyder, who was the most fashionable practitioner in the City, spent his entire time moving to and fro in an almost noiseless motor earnestly advising people to keep quiet. “You must keep very quiet for a little while,” he would say with a sigh, as he sat beside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he would shake his head very impressively and say, “You must keep him very quiet,” and so pass out, quite soundlessly. By this means Dr. Slyder often succeeded in keeping people quiet for weeks. It was all the medicine that he knew. But it was enough. And as his patients always got well – there being nothing wrong with them – his reputation was immense.
    Very naturally the Wizard and his wife were impressed with him. They had never seen such therapeutics in CahogaCounty, where the practice of medicine is carried on with forceps, pumps, squirts, splints, and other instruments of violence.
    The waiter had hardly gone when a boy appeared at the door. This time he presented to Tomlinson not one telegram but a little bundle of them.
    The Wizard read them with a lengthening face. The first ran something like this, “Congratulate you on your daring market turned instantly;” and the next, “Your opinion justified market rose have sold at 20 points profit;” and a third, “Your forecast entirely correct C.P. rose at once send further instructions.”
    These and similar messages were from brokers’ offices, and all of them were in the same tone; one told him that C.P. was up, and another T.G.P. had passed 129, and another that T.C.R.R. had risen ten – all of which things were imputed to the wonderful sagacity of Tomlinson. Whereas if they had told him that X.Y.Z. had risen to the moon he would have been just as wise as to what it meant.
    “Well,” said the wife of the Wizard as her husband finished looking through the reports, “how are things this morning? Are they any better?”
    “No,” said Tomlinson, and he sighed as he said it; “this is the worst day yet. It’s just been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same. I can’t do the figuring of it like you can, but I reckon I must have made another hundred thousand dollars since yesterday.”
    “You don’t say so!” said mother, and they looked at one another gloomily.
    “And half a million last week, wasn’t it?” said Tomlinson as he sank into a chair. “I’m afraid, mother,” he continued, “it’s no good. We don’t know how. We weren’t brought up to it.”
    All of which meant that if the editor of the
Monetary Afternoon
or
Financial Sunday
had been able to know what was happening with the two wizards, he could have written up a news story calculated to electrify all America.
    For the truth was that Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance, was attempting to carry out a
coup
greater than any as yet attributed to him by the Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his soul, crushed by the Grand Palaver, overwhelmed with the burden of high finance, had become his aim, to be done with it, to get rid of his whole fortune.
    But if you own a fortune that is computed anywhere from fifty millions up, with no limit at the top, if you own one-half of all the preferred stock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold in hydraulic bucketfuls from a quarter of a mile of river bed, the task of losing it is no easy matter.
    There are men, no doubt, versed in finance, who might succeed in doing it. But they have a training that Tomlinson lacked. Invest it as he would in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock, the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful away, back came two in its place. And at every new
coup
the crowd applauded the incomparable daring, the unparalleled prescience of the Wizard.
    Like the touch of Midas, his hand turned everything to