.
He established a delicatessen counter. He dealt directly with the
farmers, so that his butter and eggs were not only always dependable but
were a shade better than those sold by the finest groceries in the city.
One of his specialties was Boston baked beans, and so popular did it
become that the Twin Cabin Bakery paid him better than handsomely for
the privilege of taking it over. He made time to study the farmers, the
very apples they grew, and certain farmers he taught how properly to
make cider. As a side-line, his New England apple cider proved his
greatest success, and before long, after he had invaded San Francisco,
Berkeley, and Alameda, he ran it as an independent business.

But always his eyes were fixed on Broadway. Only one other intermediate
move did he make, which was to as near as he could get to the Ashland
Park Tract, where every purchaser of land was legally pledged to put up
no home that should cost less than four thousand dollars. After that
came Broadway. A strange swirl had come in the tide of the crowd. The
drift was to Washington Street, where real estate promptly soared while
on Broadway it was as if the bottom had fallen out. One big store after
another, as the leases expired, moved to Washington.

The crowd will come back, Josiah Childs said, but he said it to himself.
He knew the crowd. Oakland was growing, and he knew why it was growing.
Washington Street was too narrow to carry the increasing traffic. Along
Broadway, in the physical nature of things, the electric cars, ever in
greater numbers, would have to run. The realty dealers said that the
crowd would never come back, while the leading merchants followed the
crowd. And then it was, at a ridiculously low figure, that Josiah Childs
got a long lease on a modern, Class A building on Broadway, with a
buying option at a fixed price. It was the beginning of the end for
Broadway, said the realty dealers, when a grocery was established in its
erstwhile sacred midst. Later, when the crowd did come back, they said
Josiah Childs was lucky. Also, they whispered among themselves that he
had cleared at least fifty thousand on the transaction.

It was an entirely different store from his previous ones. There were no
more bargains. Everything was of the superlative best, and superlative
best prices were charged. He catered to the most expensive trade in
town. Only those who could carelessly afford to pay ten per cent. more
than anywhere else, patron