straw-colored--how he hated them all! Suddenly he came upon a new
letter, a square, thick, well addressed letter of unmistakable
respectability.

"Can it be an invitation?" said George Henry, his heart beating. He
opened the sturdy envelope and read the words it had enclosed. Then he
leaned back, very still, in his chair, with his eyes shut. His heart
bled over what he had suffered. "Had" suffered--yes, that was right, for
it was all a thing of the past. The letter made it clear that he was
comparatively a rich man. That was all.

It was the despised--but not altogether despised, since he had thought
of making it his home--poplar land in Michigan. The poplar supply is
limited, and paper-mills have capacious maws. Prices of raw material had
gone up, and the poplar hunters had found George Henry's land the most
valuable to them in the region. A syndicate offered him one hundred
dollars an acre for the tract.

Joy failed to kill George Henry Harrison. It stunned him somewhat, but
he showed wonderful recuperative powers. As he ate a free-lunch after a
five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which
would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from
commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed
because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes
cracked. His demeanor when he called upon an attorney, a former friend,
was quite that of an American gentleman perfectly at his ease.

Within a few days George Henry Harrison had deposited to his credit in
bank the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, minus the slight
cost of certain immediate personal requirements. Then one morning he