Excerpt from The Race for Wealth, Vol. 1 of 2: A Novel Many years ago, in the dull cold light of a February afternoon, a stranger in London wended his way Due East through the city. He was very young; he was very hopeful; he was very confident of himself; very sanguine as to his own future; he had entered the great Metropolis not an hour before with the intention of conquering it, if such an expression be sufficiently intelligible; in the pages that are to come will be found the tale of his failures and his successes, of his faults and virtues, of his errors and repentance. Whatever of interest this book may contain will be centered in him and his; and for all these reasons it is fitting that the story which has still to be written should commence as he sets foot in London for the first time, and follow his steps till the chronicle is ended, and the volume closed. It is a strange home which he is seeking; a singu lar locality in which he is about to pitch his tent East, due East, in the Christian Babylon, in that great city whose inhabitants are as the sands of the sea shore. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.