The Ball of Fire by George Randolph Chester

There began to be strange new stirrings in the world. Money! From the land which was its home and place of abode it leaned over cross the wide seas, and made potent whisperings in the ears of the countries where money is despised and held vulgar. They all listened. The particular potency lay in the fact that the money was so big, which took away tremendously from its despicableness and its vulgarity.

A black-bearded Grand Duke from the wide land of the frozen seas humbled himself to plain Ivan Strolesky at the sound of that whisper, and hurried westward. A high dignitary of an empire upon which the sun never sets, hid his title under a plebeian nom de plume, and stalked stolidly away westward to that whisper of despised American money. From the land of fashion, from the land of toys, from the land of art and music, from the land of cherry blossoms, from the land of the drowsing drug, from the land of the flashing jewels, from the lands of the burning sands and the lands of the midnight sun, there came the highest of power; and they all, light and swarth, and bearded and smooth, and large and small, and robed and trousered, centred toward the city of strong men, and, one by one, presented themselves, in turn, to a grave and silent kinky-haired old darky by the name of Ephraim.