A FORGOTTEN FORTUNE.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 February 1916, Page 2

A FORGOTTEN FORTUNE.

A WAR-TIME DISCOVERY. One of the most fantastic incidents of the war-stock craze 011 Wall Street was not the result of an investment at all, but of absent-mindedness, The Brooklyn Eagle tells the story:— How would you like to wake up tomorrow morning and discover that you owned a bundle of Bethlehem Steel securities. which you had purchased back in 1908, when the stock could be bought for a mere song, comparatively speaking? Frederick M. Kerr unearthed 28 shares of the valuable stock in one of the drawers of his desk in his Jamaica •home. His mind was as far from Bethlehem Steel as the Gowanus Canal is from Petrograd, when he wae rummaging through the drawer, filled witli legal documents and business letters. He pushed aside a package of papers several times which he indifferently regarded as some "hunk" which he had "been lured into buying by a "friend of a friend who had a friend in Wall Street." But the bundle got in his way so often in his search for a certain paper that in sheer desperation, and with his mind made up to take a last look at the "evidence" and hurl it into the waste-paper basket with the rest of the '■good things,'' he opened up the hand-somely-engraved testimonial, and to his astonishment—''Twenty-eight shares of Bethlehem Steel!" he shouted. He read and re-read the document to make sure that it wasn't a hallucination. But. sure enough, everything was all right, and he recalled the'whole incident leading up to his possession of the securities. Someone had told him to put a few hundred dollars in steel stock and some, day it might earn a few more hundreds. It was in the spring of 1908, when he was a bachelor, ami, thinking seriously of marriage and the possibility of making use of the profits on his investment of SSRdol. (£6O), the price he paid for the 28 shares, which at that time were down to 12dol. (£2 8s) a share. How the value of that bundle of papers lias soared since they were lirst carelessly thrown into the drawer of the desk is known to everyone. To-day the stock is quoted at 580. Tlie little package of papers has been transferred to a place of safe keeping, for at this moment they are worth 10,240(lol. (£3248). showing a net profit of ]5,004d01. (£3IBO 16s) 011 an investment of HilGdol. The further changes in value since that date have probably caused some i more eddies of feeling, which may better be imagined than described.