re one leads,
others will follow; and the mere following breeds success, if only by
the sheer impetus of the massed forward movement. Jasper Grierson was
the man of the hour, but the price paid for leadership by the led is apt
to be high. When Wahaska became a city, with a charter and a bonded
debt, electric lights, water-works, and a trolley system, Grierson's
interest predominated in every considerable business venture in it, save
and excepting the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.

He was the president of one bank, and the principal stockholder in the
other, which was practically an allied institution; he was the sole
owner of the grain elevator, the saw- and planing-mills, the box
factory, and a dozen smaller industries in which his name did not
appear. Also, it was his money, or rather his skill as a promoter, which
had transformed the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad from a logging switch,
built to serve the saw-mill, into an important and independent
connecting link in the great lake region system.

In each of these commercial or industrial chariots the returned native
sat in the driver's seat; and those who remembered him as a loutish
young farmhand overlooked the educative results of continued success and
marvelled at his gifts, wondering how and where he had acquired them.

While the father was thus gratifying a purely Gothic lust for conquest,
the daughter figured, in at least one small circle, as a beautiful young
Vandal, with a passion for overturning all the well-settled traditions.
At first her attitude toward Wahaska and the Wahaskans had been serenely
tolerant; the tolerance of the barbarian who neither understands, nor
sympathizes with, the homely virtues and the customs which have grown
out of them. Then resentment awoke, and with it a soaring ambition to
reconstruct the social fabric of the countrified town upon a model of
her own devising.

In this charitable undertaking she was aided and abetted by her father,
who indulgently paid the bills. At her instigation he built an imposing
red brick mansion on the sloping shore of Lake Minnedaska, named it--or
suffered her to name it--"Mereside," had an artist of parts up from
Chicago to design the decorations and superintend the furnishings, had a
landscape gardener from Philadelphia to lay out the grounds, and, when
all was in readiness, gave a house-warming to which the invitations were
in some sense mandatory, since by that time he had a finger in nearly