built cost ten thousand dollars when it was finished, and
it may still be seen as part of the great rambling structure that he
built in the nineties. John put five hundred dollars' worth of books
into the new house--sets of books, which strangely enough he forced
himself to wade through laboriously, and thus he cultivated a habit of
reading that always remained with him. In those days the books with
cracked backs in his library were Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson. And
after a hard day's work he would come home to his poets and his piano.
He thought out the whole plan of the Barclay Economy Car Door Strip
about midnight, sitting in his night clothes at the piano after
reading "Abt Vogler," and the central idea for the address on the
"Practical Transcendentalist," which he delivered at the opening of
the state university the next year, came to him one winter night after
he had tried to compose a clanging march as an air to fit Emerson's
"The Sphinx." After almost a quarter of a century that address became
the first chapter of Barclay's famous book, which created such
ribaldry in the newspapers, entitled "The Obligations of Wealth."

It was in 1879 that Barclay patented his Economy Door Strip, and put
it in his grain cars. It saved loss of grain in shipping, and Barclay,
being on terms of business intimacy with the railroad men, sold the
Economy Strip to the railroads to use on every car of grain or flour
he shipped. And Lycurgus Mason, taken from the kitchen of the Mason
House, hired a room over McHurdie's harness shop, and made the strips
there. His first day in his new shop is impressed upon his memory by
an incident that is the seed of a considerable part of this story.

He always remembers that day, because, when he got to the Thayer
House, he found John there in the buggy waiting for him, and a crowd
of men sitting around smoking cigars. In the seat by Barclay was a
cigar-box, and Lycurgus cut in, before John could speak, with, "Well,
which is it?"

And John returned, "A girl--get in; Mother Mason needs you."

Lycurgus fumbled under the box lid for a cigar as he got into the
buggy, and repeated: "Mother needs me, eh? Well, now, ain't that just
like a woman, taking a man from his work in the middle of the day?
What are you going to name her?"

"How do you like Jeanette?" asked Barclay, as he turned the horse.
"You know we can't have two Janes," he explained.

"Well," asked the elder man, tentatively, "how does