mountains, so different from the quick, short steps of the city man.
Beggars, and some who from their look and apparel might not have been
beggars, applied to him so often that he said to one of them, a fairly
well-dressed man with a nose of a slightly red tinge:

"Well, I must have a very benevolent face or a very credulous one!"

"You have," said the man, with brazen frankness, pocketing the
half-dollar given him on his tale of a picked pocket and a remittance
that had gone wrong.

Keith laughed and passed on.

Meantime, Keith was making some discoveries. He did not at first call on
Norman Wentworth. He had a feeling that it might appear as if he were
using his friendship for a commercial purpose. He presented his business
letters. His letters, however, failed to have the weight he had
expected. The persons whom he had met down in New Leeds, during their
brief visits there, were, somehow, very different when met in New York.
Some whom he called on were civil enough to him; but as soon as he
broached his business they froze up. The suggestion that he had
coal-property to sell sent them down to zero. Their eyes would glint
with a shrewd light and their faces harden into ice. One or two told him
plainly that they had no money to embark in "wild-cat schemes."

Mr. Creamer of Creamer, Crustback & Company, Capitalists, a tall,
broad-shouldered man, with a strongly cut nose and chin and keen, gray
eyes, that, through long habitude, weighed chances with an infallible
appraisement, to whom Keith had a letter from an acquaintance, one of
those casual letters that mean anything or nothing, informed him frankly