, my boy, you met the biggest man in the South to-day."

Immediately the crimson face, the white-trousered legs, the round
stomach, and even the gouty toe, were surrounded in my imagination with
a romantic halo. "What's he done to make him so big?" I asked.

"Done? Why, he's done everything. He's opened the South, he's restored
trade, he's made an honest fortune out of the carpet-baggers. It's
something to own nine-tenths of the Old Dominion Tobacco Works, and to
be vice-president of the Bonfield Trust Company, but it's a long sight
better to be president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
If you happen to know of a bigger job than that, I wish you'd point it
out."

I couldn't point it out, and so I told him, at which he gave a friendly
guffaw and led the way in silence up the sagging staircase. At that
moment all that had been mere formless ambition in my mind was
concentrated into a single burning desire; and I swore to myself, as I
followed Bob, the manager, up the dark staircase to the leaf department,
that I, too, would become before I died the biggest man in the South and
the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The idea
which was to possess me utterly for thirty years dropped into my brain
and took root on that morning in the heavy atmosphere of the Old
Dominion Tobacco Works. From that hour I walked not aimlessly, but
toward a definite end. I might start in life, I told myself, with a
market basket, but I would start also with the resolution that out of
the market basket the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad should
arise. The vow was still on my lips when the large sliding door on the
landing swung open, and we entered an immense barnlike room, in which
three or four hundred negroes were at work stemming tobacco.

At first the stagnant fumes of the dry leaf mingling with the odours of
so many tightly packed bodies, caused me to turn suddenly dizzy, and the
rows of shining black faces swam before my eyes in a blur with the
brilliantly dyed turbans of the women. Then I gritted my teeth fiercely,
the mist cleared, and I listened undisturbed to the melancholy chant
which accompanied the rhythmic movements of the lithe brown fingers.

At either end of the room, which covered the entire length and breadth
of the building, the windows were shut fast, and on the outside, close
against the greenish panes, innumerable flies swarmed like a black
curtain. Before the long tro