s that of Adolf
Scherer, the giant German immigrant at the head of the Boyne Iron
Works. His life would easily lend itself to riotous romance. In the old
country, in a valley below the castle perched on the rack above, he had
begun life by tending his father's geese. What a contrast to "Steeltown"
with its smells and sickening summer heat, to the shanty where Mrs.
Scherer took boarders and bent over the wash-tub! She, too, was an
immigrant, but lived to hear her native Wagner from her own box at
Covent Garden; and he to explain, on the deck of an imperial yacht,
to the man who might have been his sovereign certain processes in the
manufacture of steel hitherto untried on that side of the Atlantic. In
comparison with Adolf Scherer, citizen of a once despised democracy, the
minor prince in whose dominions he had once tended geese was of small
account indeed!

The Adolf Scherer of that day--though it is not so long ago as time
flies--was even more solid and impressive than the man he afterwards
became, when he reached the dizzier heights from which he delivered
to an eager press opinions on politics and war, eugenics and woman's
suffrage and other subjects that are the despair of specialists. Had he
stuck to steel, he would have remained invulnerable. But even then
he was beginning to abandon the field of production for that of
exploitation: figuratively speaking, he had taken to soap, which with
the aid of water may be blown into beautiful, iridescent bubbles to
charm the eye. Much good soap, apparently, has gone that way, never to
be recovered. Everybody who was anybody began to blow bubbles about that
time, and the bigger the bubble the greater its attraction for investors
of hard-earned savings. Outside of this love for financial iridescence,
let it be called, Mr. Scherer seemed to care little then for glitter
of any sort. Shortly after his elevation to the presidency of the Boyne
Iron Works he had been elected a member of the Boyne Club,--an honour of
which, some thought, he should have been more sensible; but generally,
when in town, he preferred to lunch at a little German restaurant
annexed to a saloon, where I used often to find him literally towering
above the cloth,--for he was a giant with short legs,--his napkin
tucked into his shirt front, engaged in lively conversation with the
ministering Heinrich. The chef at the club, Mr. Scherer insisted, could
produce nothing equal to Heinrich's sauer-kraut and sausage.