, which were to be connected by a covered passageway, or
pergola, which could be inclosed with glass in winter.
The most popular local stone, a green granite was chosen; but Mr.
Ellsworth promised to present it in such a way that it would be
especially pleasing. Cowperwood, Sr., decided that he could afford to
spent seventy-five thousand dollars--he was now worth two hundred and
fifty thousand; and Frank decided that he could risk fifty, seeing
that he could raise money on a mortgage. He planned at the same time to
remove his office farther south on Third Street and occupy a building
of his own. He knew where an option was to be had on a twenty-five-foot
building, which, though old, could be given a new brownstone front and
made very significant. He saw in his mind's eye a handsome building,
fitted with an immense plate-glass window; inside his hardwood fixtures
visible; and over the door, or to one side of it, set in bronze letters,
Cowperwood & Co. Vaguely but surely he began to see looming before him,
like a fleecy tinted cloud on the horizon, his future fortune. He was to
be rich, very, very rich.
Chapter XIII
During all the time that Cowperwood had been building himself up thus
steadily the great war of the rebellion had been fought almost to its
close. It was now October, 1864. The capture of Mobile and the Battle of
the Wilderness were fresh memories. Grant was now before Petersburg, and
the great general of the South, Lee, was making that last brilliant and
hopeless display of his ability as a strategist and a soldier. There had
been times--as, for instance, during the long, dreary period in which
the country was waiting for Vicksburg to fall, for the Army of the
Potomac to prove victorious, when Pennsylvania was invaded by Lee--when
stocks fell and commercial conditions were very bad generally. In
times like these Cowperwood's own manipulative ability was taxed to the
utmost, and he had to watch every hour to see that his fortune was not
destroyed by some unexpected and destructive piece of news.
His personal attitude toward the war, however, and aside from his
patriotic feeling that the Union ought to be maintained, was that it
was destructive and wasteful. He was by no means so wanting in patriotic
emotion and sentiment but that he could feel that the Union, as it had
now come to be, spreading its great length from the Atlantic to the
Pacific and from the snows of Canada to the Gulf, was wort
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