Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich by Stephen Leacock Page A

But how? Who did they know that would take it?
    It had crossed their minds – for who could live in the City a month without observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, as fine as any departmental store in town? – that they might give it to the college.
    But there, it seemed, the way was blocked.
    “You see, mother,” said the puzzled Wizard, “we’re not known. We’re strangers. I’d look fine going up there to the college and saying, ‘I want to give you people a million dollars.’ They’d laugh at me!”
    “But don’t one read it in the papers,” his wife had protested, “where Mr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the colleges, more than all we’ve got, and they take it?”
    “That’s different,” said the Wizard. “He’s in with them. They all know him. Why, he’s a sort of chairman of different boards of colleges, and he knows all the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it’s no wonder that if he offers to give apension, or anything, they take it. Just think of me going up to one of the professors up there in the middle of his teaching and saying, ‘I’d like to give you a pension for life!’ Imagine it! Think what he’d say!”
    But the Tomlinsons couldn’t imagine it, which was just as well.
    So it came about that they had embarked on their system. Mother, who knew most arithmetic, was the leading spirit. She tracked out all the stocks and bonds in the front page of the
Financial Undertone
, and on her recommendation the Wizard bought. They knew the stocks only by their letters, but this itself gave a touch of high finance to their deliberations.
    “I’d buy some of this R.O.P. if I was you,” said mother; “it’s gone down from 127 to 107 in two days, and I reckon it’ll be all gone in ten days or so.”
    “Wouldn’t ‘G.G. deb.’ be better? It goes down quicker.”
    “Well, it’s a quick one,” she assented, “but it don’t go down so steady. You can’t rely on it. You take ones like R.O.P. and T.R.R. pfd.; they go down all the time and you know where you are.”
    As a result of which Tomlinson would send his instructions. He did it all from the rotunda in a way of his own that he had evolved with a telegraph clerk who told him the names of brokers, and he dealt thus through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish R.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a mule with a galvanic shock applied to its tail. At once the word was whispered that the “Tomlinson interests” were after the R.O.P. to reorganise it, and the whole floor of the Exchange scrambled for the stock.
    And so it was that after a month or two of these operations the Wizard of Finance saw himself beaten.
    “It’s no good, mother,” he repeated, “it’s just a kind of Destiny.”
    Destiny perhaps it was.
    But, if the Wizard of Finance had known it, at this very moment when he sat with the Aladdin’s palace of his golden fortune reared so strangely about him, Destiny was preparing for him still stranger things.
    Destiny, so it would seem, was devising its own ways and means of dealing with Tomlinson’s fortune. As one of the ways and means, Destiny was sending at this moment as its special emissaries two huge, portly figures, wearing gigantic goloshes, and striding downwards from the halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of these was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, and the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself. And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on “Archaeological Remains of Mitylene,” and the “Use of the Greek Pluperfect,” and little treatises such as “Education and Philanthropy,” by Dr. Boomer, and “The Excavation of Mitylene: An Estimate of Cost,” by Dr. Boyster, “Boomer on the Foundation and Maintenance of Chairs,” etc.
    Many a man in city finance who had seen Dr. Boomer enter his office with a bundle of these