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all described him. And when each had finished he began again.
    “The face,” so wrote the editor of the “Our Own Men” section of
Ourselves Monthly
, “is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length, ductile but not without its own firmness.”
    “The mouth,” so wrote the editor of the “Success” column of
Brains
, “is strong but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of the born leader of men.”
    So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson’s Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they used for such occasions, and called it
Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau capitaine de la haute finance en Amérique
; and the German weeklies, inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it
Herr Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrie-und Finanz-capitän
. Thus did Tomlinson float from Tomlinson’s Creek beside Lake Erie to the very banks of the Danube and the Drave.
    Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could one but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that inscrutable face?
    They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key. Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in his hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read the visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They were simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of Finance, were for the most part those of a windswept hillside farm beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson’s Creek runs down to the low edge of the lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples therushes of the shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snake fences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside. And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret, greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.
    When Tomlinson had opened the telegram he stood with it for a moment in his hand, looking the boy full in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling “Napoleonic abstraction.” In reality he was wondering whether to give the boy twenty-five cents or fifty.
    The message that he had just read was worded, “Morning quotations show preferred A.G. falling rapidly recommend instant sale no confidence send instructions.”
    The Wizard of Finance took from his pocket a pencil (it was a carpenter’s pencil) and wrote across the face of the message,
    “Buy me quite a bit more of the same yours truly.”
    This he gave to the boy. “Take it over to him,” he said, pointing to the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after another pause he mumbled, “Here, sonny,” and gave the boy a dollar.
    With that he turned to walk towards the elevator, and all the people about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some big financial deal was going through – a
coup
, in fact, they called it.
    The elevator took the Wizard to the second floor. As he went up he felt in his pocket and gripped a quarter, then changed his mind and felt for a fifty-cent piece, and finally gave them both to the elevator boy, after which he walkedalong the corridor till he reached the corner suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a thousand dollars a month ever since the Erie Auriferous Consolidated Company had begun tearing up the bed of Tomlinson’s Creek in Cahoga County with its hydraulic dredges.
    “Well, mother,” he said as he entered.
    There was a woman seated near the window, a woman with a plain,