He told how he, a mere boy of twenty-one,
burdened with a sick wife and baby, unfitted by training or ability for
any sort of lucrative employment, a hanger-on of bucket shops and, in
his palmiest days, a speculator in tiny lots of feebly margined stocks,
finding himself without means of support, conceived the alluring idea of
soliciting funds for investment, promising enormous interest, and paying
this interest out of the principal intrusted to him. For a time he
preyed only upon his friends, claiming "inside information" of large
"deals" and paying ten per cent. per week on the money received out of
his latest deposits.
Surely the history of civilization is a history of credulity. Miller
prospered. His earlier friend-customers who had hesitatingly taken his
receipt for ten dollars, and thereafter had received one dollar every
Monday morning, repeated the operation and returned in ever-increasing
numbers. From having his office "in his hat," he took an upper room in a
small two-story house at 144 Floyd Street, Brooklyn--an humble tenement,
destined to be the scene of one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of
man's cupidity and foolishness in modern times.
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