e put out his huge foot and
pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little den and the
book-keepers, in their larger den outside.

"In personal appearance," wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now
studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue,
"Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a
square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey
beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is
short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his
eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according
to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair
with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was
unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head droops
somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far
from a pair of massive shoulders."

"I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin," said Lapham.

"Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin," replied
Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue eyes.

"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that,"
he said. "But there's no disgrace in having been born, and I was born
in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line--so well
up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was
bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was
about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty years ago: this is '75, and
that was '20. Well, say I'm fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em,
too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a
farm, and----"

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation
thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of
his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist. "Any barefoot
business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the
youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know," said
Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect,
"I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won't interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed. "You'll see; it'll
come out all right." And in fact it did so, in the interview which
Bart