A Poor Wise Man

for the investment of his small capital. That was in the very beginning of the epoch of steel. The iro

But he had never dreamed of steel. But "sixty-five" saw the first steel rail rolled in America, and Anthony Cardew began to dream. He went to Chicago f

ing with steel cable at the very time Roebling made it a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge and the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his, the difference only of a month o

across the river, he built his first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast iron pip

. Labor was cheap and plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent. Perhaps Anthony Cardew

, tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alien in the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick house in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet

n which he gave the wine list and the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrial pioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the city the cente

ny lived

of the mountains, Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and coal mines. His mines supplied

great as its industries. It was only in his later years that he loved power for the sake of power, and when, having outlived h

u have no stamina," he would say. "You have no moral fiber.

e rise to power of younger men; with their "shilly-shallying," he would say. He was an aristocrat, an autocrat, a

d been a

. The girl had been the tragedy of his mi

ternoons. The farmhouse was in a hollow, but always on those excursions Anthony, fastidiously dressed, picking his way half-irritably through briars and cornfields, would go to the edge of the cliffs and stand there, looking down. Below was the muddy river, sluggish always, but a t

Life for Howard was already a thing determined. He would go to college, and then he would come back and go into the mill offices. In time, he would take his father'

nce he said: "I'll build a house out here some of these days. Goo

own, the things he had builded with such labor, gave him a sense of power. "This below," he

, secure from curious eyes, draws the sheet from the still moist clay of his mo

ly, powerful, infinitely rich, and while in the direction of Anthony's farm the growth was real and rapid, it was the plain people who lined its rapidly extending avenues with their two-story brick houses; little homes of infinite tenderness and quie

others-it was the plain people who vanquished him. Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man, hard and wiry, he neither saved h

d never h