lapel of the black coat, labeling
him the descendant of patriot warriors.

The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr.
Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation black
marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow
"Eastlake" bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable,
incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless "woodwork" everywhere,
and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees
sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as
"very fine things." They had been the first people in town to possess
Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had rested, but they still
had a feeling that in all such matters they were in the van; and when
Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the walls of other people's
houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted follower; and if he
found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying the Landseers as a final
corroboration of culture, he would say, inevitably, "Those people know
good pictures and they know good books."

The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a millionaire,
had ruined him because he had failed to understand it. When towns begin
to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody.
Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the somebody in this case. At
about the time he bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance,
an office-building and a large house not far from it, where he spent the
winter; and he had a country place--a farm of four hundred acres--where
he went for the summers to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his
home now, perforce, all the year round. If he had known how to sit
still and let things happen he would have prospered miraculously; but,
strangely enough, the dainty little man was one of the first to fall
down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the
role of Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of
the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and
buying bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers
and read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building and
the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb; then
he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to pay the
taxes on the suburban lots and to "keep