Mr. John A. Toker, the American multimillionaire, flung down his newspaper in some excitement and became lost in thought.

The paragraph that had so agitated him read:—

“The sovereign expressed to Count Zeppelin his regret at being unable on this occasion to see the airship which, he was convinced, was destined to furnish the weapon of the heights in future wars.”

For more than an hour the little old gentleman remained absorbed in his reflections; then he seized pen and paper and made various notes. He was evidently drafting a rather complicated plan. He now and again ran his pen through what he had written and substituted other words. One sheet was filled with a list of names—the names of distinguished contemporaries; another with figures, apparently a schedule of estimated expenses, in which the individual items for the most part had five or six numerals.

Even after an hour the plan was not as yet near completion, but Mr. Toker was compelled to interrupt his labors in order to take up with other demands of the day. One of his secretaries, who had made a careful preliminary sifting of the letters and dispatches brought by the morning’s mail, came with such as he had found important enough to be called to his master’s attention.

Mr. Toker dictated various answers. When this correspondence was cleared away, a host of other affairs required his consideration:—business connected with the management of his property; reports from the many concerns in which he was interested; audiences with the foremen of his enormous landed estate, his farmers and agents. Moreover, the guests at the castle and the members of his family could not be neglected, and sport and exercise were necessary to maintain his physical elasticity, while for the satisfaction of his intellectual cravings reading in many fields had to be provided for—indeed, the multimillionaire frequently found it exasperating to realize that one man might be richer than others in money, but not in time; one may have thousands of dollars to spend every hour, but not more than sixteen waking hours to spend in a day.

“Money is a great help in accomplishing big things,” Mr. Toker used to say with a sigh, “but mostly those things require much time, and in this respect I feel that I am a very poor fellow.”

Several weeks passed without the American Croesus being able to proceed with the elaboration of his project. But he carried round with him the idea that lay at the foundation of it. In his mind one thought gave birth to another; visions arose without any definite outlines; suggestions flashed through his brain, but served only as reminders of things that might later become clear.

When he again took up the notes that he had made, he canceled several names from the list and added new ones. It was a varied assortment of from thirty to forty of his contemporaries: BjÖrnson, Maurice Maeterlinck, Eleanora Duse, Elihu Root, the American statesman; Madame Curie, the discoverer of radium; Nansen, the Arctic explorer; Prince Albert of Monaco, the oceanographic scientist; TolstoÏ, Marconi, and many great men from the scientific world, who had won distinction as pathfinders in the domain of philosophy, sociology, history, and natural science.

He also went over the sheet with the numbers, and added a cipher in many cases. Thus, for example, the item of “Roses,” which had been set down at ten thousand francs, he increased to a hundred thousand. Moreover, the word “roses” frequently appeared in his notes, and the thought of those queenly flowers seemed especially to impress itself on his mind, for the pencilings which he made on the edge of the paper, as he strove to catch an idea, portrayed very clearly, even if inartistically, the forms of roses and rosebuds.

One sheet was filled with catchwords the meaning of which to one uninitiated would have been scarcely comprehensible: as, for instance, “Concentration and accumulation of forces. Motion through explosions. Agglomeration of scattered atoms. Energy radiating in all directions. Roses, roses... the Power of Beauty. Subjugation of the forces of Nature. High flying. Revelations. New lights, new tones, new thoughts, moss roses....”