Summer Is A-Coming In.

THE HE old English "round" bearing this title is probably, the most ancient piece of part-music in existence. A manuscript copy of it, now in the British Museum, was transcribed by John of Fornsete, a monk of Reading, in or about the year 1226. In this arrangement, specially prepared for THE SCRAP BOOK, the melody is given as a song suitable for a medium voice, male or female, with piano accompaniment.

DICKENS IN CAMP.

HARLES DICKENS died in his home at Gadshill, in Kent, on June 9, 1870. The weeks preceding his death had been weeks of fatigue and illness; but with the coming of the warm summer days he seemed once more to exhibit his old vitality. Many incidents that gave him pleasure had occurred. A resident of Liverpool had written him a letter describing himself as a self-made man who believed that he owed his success to what Dickens had written about the wisdom of kindness and sympathy for others. The writer enclosed a check for five hundred pounds which he begged the author to accept as a slight acknowledgment of the benefits received. This letter greatly touched Dickens, who returned the check, but said that it would give him pleasure to receive any slight remembrance given in another form. His correspondent then sent him an elaborate silver basket and a silver centerpiece containing figures representing the four seasons. The donor, however, had shrunk from sending a symbol of winter to one who had then passed the autumn of his life, and so he had removed this figure from the design.

"I never look at it," said Dickens, "without thinking most of winter!"

On the day before his death, the novelist had been steadily at work upon his last book, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"; and had finished a beautiful description of a summer morning. When this was completed, he was taken with a sudden pain, and presently became unconscious. He died the next evening in the fifty-eighth year of his age. The news of his death was telegraphed all over the civilized world, and was received everywhere with grief and sympathy. Men and women of every rank and type joined in the expression of sorrow; for Dickens, through his intense humanity, had appealed alike to the noble and the lowly. One of the most touching tributes to the universality of his fame was written by the pen of Bret Harte in the poem which is here reprinted, and which shows that in a rough mining-camp of the Far West the creator of Little Nell was known and loved no less sincerely than in the stately dwellings of his own country.

The Franklin Syndicate, the Woman's Bank, the Arizona Diamond Conspiracy, the Humbert Swindle, and Other Historical Cases-While Human Nature Is What It Is, the Old Frauds Will Reappear.

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An original article written for THE SCRAP BOOK.

ITHIN the last few years public attention has been called to several dishonest financial schemes of great magnitude, and the impression has grown that the business world of America has fallen to a lower ethical plane. The truth is that financial dishonesty is endemic, though it becomes epidemic when conditions are favorable. After the exposure of series of Chadwick cases and Miller syndicates people begin to think that all fraud has been rooted up. Doubtless the collapse of the Carthage Ivory, Slave, and Exploration Company astonished

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the Phoenicians and convinced them that the world would never again be deceived in such a manner, and probably the Greeks felt the same way about the Atlantis Gold and Land Exploitation Syndicate.

There has never been an age without its Chadwicks and Millers.

Moreover, one scheme begets another. The fifty-million-dollar South Sea Bubble of nearly two hundred years ago not only swallowed up the savings of rural and urban England, but suggested the Mississippi Scheme, which cost the French people no less than a hundred million dollars.

THE FRANKLIN SYNDICATE IN BROOKLYN (1899). The Marvelous Story of William F. Miller's "Ten Per Cent a Week” Enterprise.

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ILLER'S five-hundred-and-twen- whole world looked open-eyed at the milty-per-cent syndicate was at lions created by the great steel merger least three hundred years old in and the fluctuations of stocks. Newsidea. In the time of Elizabeth paper stories of these great fortunes it was operated successfully in England, watered the field that Miller and his though the immoderate dividends were companions were to till. supposed to be paid from the plunder of mythical privateers, instead of fictitious investments in stocks. So large were the dividends and so glowing the promises that the shares rose to tremendous values. They were, of course, paid out of the subscriptions of new investors until the flight of the Miller of his day revealed that the only pirate doing business was the promoter himself.

The Spanish Main was the Wall Street of that time. The piling up of huge fortunes was just as intoxicating to outsiders in the sixteenth as in the first year of the twentieth century, when the

The direct inspiration of the Franklin Syndicate was a scheme known in Pittsburgh as "Fund W." This was a successful confidence game; and it is worthy of memory that Colonel Robert A. Ammon, a leading syndic of the Franklin group, was in Pittsburgh at the time when "Fund W." was in operation.

The Franklin Syndicate was started modestly. William F. Miller, a small, pale young man, living in a tenement at 144 Floyd Street, in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn, and an earnest member of a near-by church, confided to the corner groceryman and a few