n. He thereupon assumed the theater lease
and what had been the old "Grand Opera House" became under his ownership
"Hastings's Theater," or "The Hastings."

Fanny Montgomery had contented herself with the hand of a young man
named Fosdick who had been summoned to town to organize a commercial
club. In two years he added several industries to Montgomery's scant
list, and wheedled a new passenger station out of one of the lordly
railroads that had long held the town in scorn. Two of the industries
failed, the new station was cited as an awful example by the Professor
of Fine Arts at the college, and yet Paul Fosdick made himself essential
to Montgomery. The commercial club's bimonthly dinners gave the solid
citizens an excuse for leaving home six nights a year, and in a
community where meetings of whist clubs and church boards constituted
the only justification for carrying a latch-key this new freedom
established him at once as a friend of mankind. Fosdick was wholly
presentable, and while his contributions to the industrial glory of
Montgomery lacked elements of permanence, he had, so the "Evening Star"
solemnly averred, "done much to rouse our citizens from their lethargy
and blaze the starward trail." After he married Fanny, Fosdick opened an
office adjoining the Commercial Club rooms and his stationery bore the
legend "Investment Securities." Judge Walters, in appointing a receiver
for a corporation which Fosdick had organized for the manufacture and
sale of paving-brick, inadvertently spoke of the promoter's occupation
as that of a "dealer in insecurities"; but this playfulness on the
court's part did not shake confidence in Fosdick. He was a popular
fellow, and the success of those Commercial Club dinners was not to be
discounted by the cynical flings of a judge who was rich enough to be
comfortably indifferent to criticism.

Amzi Montgomery being, as hinted, a person of philosophic temperament,
had interposed no manner of objection to the several marriages of his
sisters until Josephine, the oldest, and the last to marry, tendered him
a brother-in-law in the person of Alexander Waterman. Josephine was the
least attractive of the sisters, and also, it was said, the meekest, the
kindest, and the most amiable. An early unhappy affair with a young
minister was a part of the local tradition, and she had been cited as a
broken-hearted woman until she married Waterman. Waterman was a lawyer
who had been seized early in