Be that as it may.  In swift succession there now followed the so-called “legal” seizure and confiscation of all his properties.  In the first place, by alienists representing the District Attorney and the State banking department, he was declared sane and placed on trial for embezzlement.  Secondly, his sister’s plea that his property be put into her hands as trustee or administrator was thrown out of court and she herself arrested and confined for perjury on the ground that she had perjured herself in swearing that she was his next of kin when in reality his real parents, or so they swore, were alive and in America.  Next, his banks, trust companies and various concerns, including his great country estate, were swiftly thrown into the hands of receivers (what an appropriate name!) and wound up “for the benefit of creditors.”  All the while X——­ was in prison, protesting that he was really not guilty, that he was solvent, or had been until he was attacked by the State bank examiner or the department back of him, and that he was the victim of a cold-blooded conspiracy which was using the State banking department and other means to drive him out of financial life, and that solely because of his desire to grow and because by chance he had been impinging upon one of the choicest and most closely guarded fields of the ultra-rich of Wall Street—­the street railway area in New York and Brooklyn.

One day, so he publicly swore to the grand jury, by which he was being examined, as he was sitting in his great offices, in one of the great sky-scrapers of New York, which occupied an entire floor and commanded vast panoramas in every direction (another evidence of the man’s insane “delusion of grandeur,” I presume), he was called to answer the telephone.  One Mr. Y——­, so his assistant said, one of the eminent financiers of Wall Street and America, was on the wire.  Without any preliminary and merely asking was this Mr. X——­ on the wire, the latter proceeded, “This is Mr. Y——.  Listen closely to what I am going to say.  I want you to get out of the street railway business in New York or something is going to happen to you.  I am giving you a reasonable warning.  Take it.”  Then the phone clicked most savagely and ominously and superiorly at the other end.

“I knew at the time,” went on X——­, addressing the grand jury, “that I was really listening to the man who was most powerful in such affairs in New York and elsewhere and that he meant what he said.  At the same time I was in no position to get out without closing up the one deal which stood to net me two million dollars clear if I closed it.  At the same time I wanted to enter this field and didn’t see why I shouldn’t.  If I didn’t it spelled not ruin by any means but a considerable loss, a very great loss, to me, in more ways than one.  Oddly enough, just at this time I was being pressed by those with whom I was associated to wind up this particular venture and turn my attention