Until long after midnight he smoked and calculated and dreamed.

For the first time the immensity of that million thrust itself upon him.

If on that very day, October the first, he were to begin the task of spending it he would have but three hundred and fifty-seven days in which to accomplish the end.

Taking the round sum of one million dollars as a basis, it was an easy matter to calculate his average daily disbursement.

The situation did not look so utterly impossible until he held up the little sheet of paper and ruefully contemplated the result of that simple problem in mathematics.
It meant an average daily expenditure of $2,801.12 for nearly a year, and even then there would be sixteen cents left over, for, in proving the result of his rough sum in division, he could account for but $999,999.84.