| OCR Text |
Show OUR AMBASSADOR TO ST. JAMES. H A distinguished American returning from Lon- H don says Ambassador Reid is seeking to make Londoners forget the masterful Choate in the kingly magnificence of his own entertainments;.. that ho other former ambassador ever tried to approximate to the lavish entertainments given by Reid. This will be interesting news to west- 'H coast men, for they will naturally feel an interest in the matter. If not interest certainly principal, for many of them were in the old days 0911-. tributors to the fund which Mr. Reid is using in4 order to astonish Londoners. Those who bought Overman at $58 or Ophir jH at $127, or Sierra Nevada at $126, or Bullion at H $34 almost any of them, helped to make up the H fund on which Mr. Reid is splurging, because it , H was so fixed that when all the professional men, JH all the business men, all the miners, all the scrv- H ant girls and hostlers from Mount Davidson to Telegraph Hill made a big losing in the old days there were a few who did well and told philosophically of the advantages that lay in buy-ing buy-ing stocks when they were low and selling when they were high. At that time Mr. Whitelaw Reid was a gentleman who wore a tremendously high collar and carried around with him the biggest pair of feet that the great middle west ever pro-duced, pro-duced, and was known as a newspaper corre-spondent corre-spondent of reasonable descriptive powers when close adherence to the facts was not an absolute stipulation. But at the same time another gen-tleman gen-tleman who later became Mr. Reid's father-in- HI law, was in the far west and possessed many ad- h vantages over the masses in seeing some things that were going to happen. Indeed it was some-times some-times whispered that he was endowed with pow- jH ers that enabled him to plan what was going to happen; that he was endowed with the hypnotic powers of the Indian magician, who makes the audiences see him throw a rope into the air which takes the form of a ladder and then sends men jH to climb the ladder, but when a photograph is taken of the scene only the fakir is in evidence. H All the boys and girls in the west saw the ropes thrown on the Comstock, a great many of H them believed they knew the ropes and invested accordingly, but when a photograph was taken jB the negative revealed nothing but two or three H magicians who had headquarters in the neighobr- H hood of California street, San Francisco. H In those days the father-in-law of Mr. Reid Hi did remarkably well, so well that he soon be- Hjj came a, national financial power. $e hi " a small H |
