Points of Friction
digging for buried treasures on the unimpeachable authority of a soothsayer. The testimony offered in a New Jersey court that a man had bought some farmland because the spirit of a young negro girl had indicated that there was money hidden beneath the soil; the arraignment before a Brooklyn magistrate of two Gipsy women, charged with stealing the cash they had been commissioned to "bless," are proof, if proof were needed, that intelligence has not kept pace with cupidity.
The endless stories about messenger boys and elevator men who have been given a Wall Street "tip," and who have become capitalists in a day, are astonishingly like the stories which went their round when the South-Sea Bubble hung iridescent over London. Mankind has never wearied of such tales since Aladdin (one of Fortune's fools) won his easy way to wealth. Even the old dime novel with "Dare-Devil Dick," or "Jas-
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