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hundred guests to twelve hundred seats in the theatres at four dollars a seat. But most of all do you appreciate the character of the Grand Palaver when you step into its rotunda. Aladdin’s enchanted palace was nothing to it. It has a vast ceiling with a hundred glittering lights, and within it night and day is a surging crowd that is never still and a babel of voices that is never hushed, and over all therehangs an enchanted cloud of thin blue tobacco smoke such as might enshroud the conjured vision of a magician of Bagdad or Damascus.
    In and through the rotunda there are palm-trees to rest the eye and rubber-trees in boxes to soothe the mind, and there are great leather lounges and deep arm-chairs, and here and there huge brass ash-bowls as big as Etruscan tear-jugs. Along one side is a counter with grated wickets like a bank, and behind it are five clerks with flattened hair and tall collars, dressed in long black frock-coats all day like members of a legislature. They have great books in front of them in which they study unceasingly, and at their lightest thought they strike a bell with the open palm of their hand, and at the sound of it a page boy in a monkey suit, with G.P. stamped all over him in brass, bounds to the desk and off again, shouting a call into the unheeding crowd vociferously. The sound of it fills for a moment the great space of the rotunda; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softly melodious, through the palm-trees of the ladies’ palm room; it is heard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill, and in the depths of the barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests a moment the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound – as might a miner in the sunken galleries of a coastal mine cease in his toil a moment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.
    And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, and the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the elevators rattle, till home itself was never half so homelike.
    “A call for Mr. Tomlinson! A call for Mr. Tomlinson!”
    So went the sound, echoing through the rotunda.
    And as the page boy found him and handed him on a salver a telegram to read, the eyes of the crowd about himturned for a moment to look upon the figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.
    There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, his shoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who had known him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson’s Creek in the country of the Great Lakes would have recognised him in a moment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that it habitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were calling it “unfathomable.” There was a certain way in which his eye roved to and fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it not that the
Financial Undertone
had recognised it as the “searching look of a captain of industry.” One might have thought that for all the goodness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not that the
Commercial and Pictorial Review
had called the face “inscrutable,” and had proved it so with an illustration that left no doubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson’s Creek, now Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly spoken of as a
face
by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, but was more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear that Napoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were never tired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson, the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance. From the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles, the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputed millions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation of poets.
    They