Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

d, there stands overlooking Central Square the Grand Palaver Hotel. It is, in truth, at no gre

ize, cut in stone; and at the other a statue of the last, ever so much larger than life, cast in bronze. And all the people who pass by pause and look at this statue and point at it with walking-sticks, because it is of extraordinary interest; in fact, it is an example of the new electro-chemical process of casting by which you can cast a state governor any size you like, no matter what you start from. Those who know a

n America," so it is labelled in all the magazines, the expensive ones, on the continent. In fact, the aim of the company that owns the Grand Palaver-and they do not attempt to conceal it-is to make the place as much a home as possible. Therein lies its charm. It is a home. You realize that when you look up at the Grand Palaver from the square at night when the twelve hundred guests have turned on the lights of the three thousand windows. You realize it at theatre time when the great string of motors come sweeping to the doors of the Palaver, to carr

ature. 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 c

ts, and the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the

omlinson! A call

nd, echoing thr

gram to read, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a mome

not that the Financial Undertone had recognized 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 w

. And when each had fi

, "is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain sof

g but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is something in the

icture which they used for such occasions, and called it Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique; and the German weeklies, inserting also a suitable picture from t

hey asked, could one but read them, must lie behin

They were simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of Finance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept 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 the rushes of the shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame hou

l in the face. His look had in it that peculiar far-away quality that the newspapers were calling "Na

g quotations show preferred A. G. falling rapidly rec

s a carpenter's pencil) and wrote across the face of the m

ting to the telegraph corner of the rotunda. Then after anoth

about him who had watched the signing of the message knew that some

ally gave them both to the elevator boy, after which he walked along the corridor till he reached the corner suite of rooms, a palace in itself, for which he was paying a

r," he said

such as they wear in the farm kitchens of Cahoga County, and a set of fash

on her with an upright feather, and they had hung gold chains on her, and everything that was most expensive they had hung and tied on mother. You might see her emerging any morning from the Grand Palaver in her beetle-back jacket and her Balkan hat, a figure of i

to have as his wife a woman like mother, because he knew that she had taugh

And the Wizard on his trips up and down to the rotunda brought her the very best, the ones that cost a dollar fifty, because he

ide his hat, and looking towards the clo

. "He's dressed, bu

venteen in a flowered dressing-gown, fancying himself ill. There was a packet of cigarettes and a box of

t and set his sturdy shoulders to the buck-saw. At present Fortune was busy taking from him the gol

en door his listening wife could hear the voice of the b

ny more of

o you suppose?" asked

the dietetics of Cahoga County, is the sole test. All those things can be eat

Tomlinson. "Would it be all right to telephone down to

er to look out into the hall and see if the

d all day. And when presently a tall waiter in dress-clothes appeared, and said, "Jelly? Yes, sir, immediately, sir; would y

wrong with Fred?" asked Tomli

He looked in this morning for a minute or two, and he said he'd lo

st noiseless motor earnestly advising people to keep quiet. "You must keep very quiet for a little while," he would say with a sigh, as he sat beside a sick-bed. As he drew on his gloves in the hall below he would shake his head very impressively and say, "You must keep him ve

seen such therapeutics in Cahoga County, where the practice of medicine is carr

at the door. This time he presented to Tomlinso

ur daring market turned instantly"; and the next, "Your opinion justified market rose have sold at 20 po

other T. G. P. had passed 129, and another that T. C. R. R. had risen ten-all of which things were imputed to the wonderful sagacity

band finished looking through the reports, "ho

been a shower of telegrams, and mostly all the same. I can't do the figuring of it like

mother, and they looked

he sank into a chair. "I'm afraid, mother," he continued, "

ial Sunday had been able to know what was happening with the two wizards,

buted to him by the Press. He was trying to lose his money. That, in the sickness of his soul, crushed by the Grand Palav

f you own one-half of all the preferred stock of an Erie Auriferous Consolidated that is digging gold

uld in the worst securities that offered, the most rickety of stock, the most fraudulent bonds, back it came to him. When he threw a handful

das, his hand turned

no use. It's like this here D

indomitable pluck and dogged industry. Some said that he had been at one time a mere farm hand who, by sheer doggedness, had fought his way from the hay-mow to the control of the produce market of seventeen states. Others had it that he had been a lumberjack who, by sheer doggedness, had got possession of the whole lumber forest of the Lake district. Oth

llside farm beside Lake Erie where the uncleared bush and the broken fields go straggling down to the lake, and to have running through

is

on the farm, as Tomlinson's father had, and never discover it for one's self. For that indeed the best medium of d

an a man spend a month of pleasure?-in looking for outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which purpose he carried a vaca

clay of the bank. When the senior professor of geology saw it and noticed a stripe like a mark on a tiger's back-a fault

see them till the sound of his eager hammer had brought them to his side. They took him up to the frame house in the clearing, where the chatelaine w

t-case, and he knew that if any person or persons would put up money enough to tear that block of rock away

oratory, with little blue flames playing underneath crucibles, as in a magician's cavern, and with the door locked. And as each sample that he tested was set aside and tied in a cardboard box by itself, he labelled it "aur. p. 75," and the pen shook in his hand as he marked it. For to professors of geology those symbols mean "this is seventy-five per cent pure gold." So it was no wonder that the senior professor of geology working far into the night among the

s in a single evening in his laboratory. It showed, at any rate, that businessmen put science at its proper value. Strangest of all was the fact that the men had told him that even this ore was apparently nothing to what there was; it had all come out of one single spot in the creek, not the hundredth part of the whole claim. Lower down, wh

b they talked of nothing else. And so great was the power of the wave that it washed Tomlinson and his wife along on the crest of it, and landed them fifty feet up in their thousand-

t amazing thing about it was the

ferred stock in the company in return for their supply of development capital. This was their own proposition; in fact, they reckoned that in doing this they were trading about two hundred thousand dollars' worth of machinery for, say ten million dollars

hind this refusal; the more so as the reason that Tomlinson gave was such a simple one. He said that he didn't want to part with the top

piece of great shrewdness. "Says his father

ot know that there was nothing strange in what Tomlinson said. His father was buried there, on the farm itself, in a grave overgrown with ra

professed to have done so, in likely places-along the prospective right-of-way of a suburban railway, for

on rapidly became a legend, the more so a

f him in the whiskey-and-soda

ome use. T. C. bonds,' I said, 'have risen twenty-two and a half in a week. You know as well as I do that they are only collateral trust, and that the stock underneath never could and never can e

, in a tone of amazement and respect. "By Jove!

s the deuce of it. That man when he wants to can put on a

earned his name of the W

linson was really and truly a wizard. He saw clearly that for himself and his wife the vast fortune that had fallen to them was of no manner of use. What did it bring

ew wealth, save only such as might be needed to

and me. He'll have opportunities we never got." He was getting them already. The opportunity to wear seven dollar patent leather shoes and a bell-shaped overcoat with a silk collar, to lounge into

mother. She was thinking o

any of them just as he likes; and no matter how busy they are, as so

hair is ready to laugh with the son of a multimillion

gold is there. It's not right to keep it back. But we'll just

ing away the fortune. But how? Who

ut observing the imposing buildings of Plutoria University, as fine as

seemed, the wa

strangers. I'd look fine going up there to the college and saying,

otested, "where Mr. Carnegie gives ever so much to the

l the heads of the schools, and the professors, so it's no wonder that if he offers to give a pension, or anything, they take it. Just think of me going

uldn't imagine it, wh

tracked out all the stocks and bonds in the front page of the Financial Undertone, and on her recommendation the Wizard

other; "it's gone down from 127 to 107 in two days

b.' be better? It

steady. You can't rely on it. You take ones like R.O.P. and T.R

ers, and he dealt thus through brokers whom he never saw. As a result of this, the sluggish R.O.P. and T.R.R. would take as sudden a leap into the air as might a mule with a galvanic sh

or two of these operations the Wi

" he repeated, "it's j

perhap

he sat with the Aladdin's palace of his golden fortune reared so stra

halls of Plutoria University to the Grand Palaver Hotel. And one of these was the gigantic Dr. Boomer, the president of the college, and the other was his professor of Greek, almost as gigantic as himself. And they carried in their capacious pockets bundles of pamphlets on "A

hs and a fighting glitter in his eyes had sunk back in his chair in dismay. For it meant that Dr. B

e Greek Pluperfect," it was as if an Arabian sultan had sent the fatal bow-string to a c

lked was like the roaring of the sea as Homer heard it. Never did Castor and Pollux come

gs, endowment, anything he liked but choose he must. And if he feared that, after all, his fortune was too vast even for such a disposal, Dr. Boomer would show him how he might use it in digging up ancient Mit

s outstretched palm before it, it concealed stra

ces of the whole directorate of the Erie Aurifer

or of geology was working again beside the blue flames in his darkened laboratory. And this time there was no shaking excitement over him

in silence was as still as the s