was. At the time Non was beginning his career
there was nothing in the building-market people found harder to hire
than honesty. Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy
and important men who did not have time to be detectives, wanted. There
did not seem to be any one very actively supplying the demand. A big
market, a small supply, and almost no competition. Non stepped in and
proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a house as
literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew
all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business
is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the
man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business. It
is not necessary to go into the details. Any reader who has ever built a
house knows the details. Just take them and turn them around.

What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain
business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without
any fine moral frills or remarks. He has done the thing because he liked
it and believed in it.

But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making
money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he
can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little
space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does
not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"--I say
to myself cheerfully--"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's
office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he
will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or
idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good
long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he
tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours
how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have
just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still
study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and
all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself,
lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he
is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of
their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a
thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadow