of the legal world, were employed who swore first that he was insane, then that he was not.  His sister, who was a physician and scientist of repute, asked the transfer of all his property to her on the ground that he was incompetent and that she was his next of kin.  To this she swore, giving as her reasons for believing him insane that he had “illusions of grandeur” and that he believed himself “persecuted by eminent financiers,” things which smacked more of sanity than anything else to me.  At the same time he and she, as time rather indicated, had arranged this in part in the hope of saving something out of the great wreck.  There were other curious features:  Certain eminent men in politics and finance who from revelations made by the books of the various banks were in close financial if not personal relations with X——­ denied this completely.  Curiously, the great cry on the part of these was that he was insane, must be, and that he was all alone in his schemes.  His life on Broadway, on Long Island, in his studio in New York, were ransacked for details.  Enough could not be made of his gay, shameful, spendthrift life.  No one else, of course, had ever been either gay or shameful before—­especially not the eminent and hounding financiers.

Then from somewhere appeared a new element.  In a staggeringly low tenement region in Brooklyn was discovered somehow or other a very old man and woman, most unsatisfactory as relatives of such imposing people, who insisted that they were his parents, that years before because he and his sister were exceedingly restless and ambitious, they had left them and had only returned occasionally to borrow money, finally ceasing to come at all.  In proof of this, letters, witnesses, old photos, were produced.  It really did appear as if he and his sister, although they had long vigorously denied it, really were the son and daughter of the two who had been petty bakers in Brooklyn, laying up a little competence of their own.  I never knew who “dug” them up, but the reason why was plain enough.  The sister was laying claim to the property as the next of kin.  If this could be offset, even though X——­ were insane, the property would at once be thrown into the hands of the various creditors and sold under a forced sale, of course—­in other words, for a song—­for their benefit.  Naturally it was of interest to those who wished to have his affairs wound up to have the old people produced.  But the great financier had been spreading the report all along that he was from Russia, that his parents, or pseudo-parents, were still there, but that really he was the illegitimate son of the Czar of Russia, boarded out originally with a poor family.  Now, however, the old people were brought from Brooklyn and compelled to confront him.  It was never really proved that he and his sister had neglected them utterly or had done anything to seriously injure them, but rather that as they had grown in place and station they had become more or less estranged and so ignored