n years. Under his eyelids
burned visions of East Falls, Connecticut, and of all the home scenes he
had been born to and brought up in. Oakland, he was thoroughly aware,
was more modern than East Falls, and the excitement caused by his garb
was only to be expected. Undisturbed by the sensation he knew he was
creating among his employes, he moved about, accompanied by his manager,
making last suggestions, giving final instructions, and radiating fond,
farewell glances at all the loved details of the business he had built
out of nothing.

He had a right to be proud of Childs' Cash Store. Twelve years before he
had landed in Oakland with fourteen dollars and forty-three cents. Cents
did not circulate so far West, and after the fourteen dollars were gone,
he continued to carry the three pennies in his pocket for a weary while.
Later, when he had got a job clerking in a small grocery for eleven
dollars a week, and had begun sending a small monthly postal order to
one, Agatha Childs, East Falls, Connecticut, he invested the three
coppers in postage stamps. Uncle Sam could not reject his own lawful
coin of the realm.

Having spent all his life in cramped New England, where sharpness and
shrewdness had been whetted to razor-edge on the harsh stone of meagre
circumstance, he had found himself abruptly in the loose and
free-and-easy West, where men thought in thousand-dollar bills and
newsboys dropped dead at sight of copper cents. Josiah Childs bit like
fresh acid into the new industrial and business conditions. He had
vision. He saw so many ways of making money all at once, that at first
his brain was in a whirl.

At the same time, being sane and conservative, he had resolutely avoided
speculation. The solid and substantial called to him. Clerking at eleven
dollars a week, he took note of the lost opportunities, of the openings
for safe enterprise, of the countless leaks in the business. If, despite
all this, the boss could make a good living, what couldn't he, Josiah
Childs, do with his Connecticut training? It was like a bottle of wine
to a thirsty hermit, this coming to the active, generous-spending West
after thirty-five years in East Falls, the last fifteen of which had
been spent in humdrum clerking in the humdrum East Falls general store.
Josiah Childs' head buzzed with the easy possibilities he saw. But he
did not lose his head. No detail was overlooked. He spent his spare
hours in studying Oakland, its people, how t