CHAPTER I.
DINNER TIME As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the harbour, St.George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous parody upon capital letters: "Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here.

You're bound to observe that this is my steam yacht.

I own her--do you see?
She belongs to me, St.George, who never before owned so much as a piece of rope." Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his own glorie"-- he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch counter.

For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_.

However, to none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to himself.
Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St.George had humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages.