phinstone was sold, the purchaser was a certain Mr. Aaron
Wickersham of New York, the father of Ferdy Wickersham, with whom Gordon
had had the rock-battle. Mr. Wickersham was a stout and good-humored
man of fifty, with a head like a billiard-bail, and a face that was both
shrewd and kindly. He had, during the war, made a fortune out of
contracts, and was now preparing to increase it in the South, where the
mountain region, filled with coal and iron, lay virgin for the first
comer with sufficient courage and astuteness to take it. He found the
new legislature of the State an instrument well fitted to his hands. It
could be manipulated.

The Wickershams had lately moved into a large new house on Fifth Avenue,
where Fashion was climbing the hill toward the Park in the effort to get
above Murray Hill, and possibly to look down upon the substantial and
somewhat prosaic mansions below, whose doors it had sometimes been found
difficult to enter. Mrs. Wickersham was from Brookford, the same town
from which the Huntingtons came, and, when a young and handsome girl,
having social ambitions, had married Aaron Wickersham when he was but a
clerk in the banking-house of Wentworth & Son. And, be it said, she had
aided him materially in advancing his fortunes. She was a handsome
woman, and her social ambitions had grown. Ferdy was her only child, and
was the joy and pride of her heart. Her ambition centred in him. He
should be the leader of the town, as she felt his beauty and his
smartness entitled him to be. It was with this aim that she induced her
husband to build the fine new house on the avenue. She knew the value of
a large and handsome mansion in a fashionable quarter. Aaron Wickersham
knew little of fashion; but he knew the power of money, and he had
absolute confidence in his wife's ability. He would furnish the means
and leave the rest to her. The house was built and furnished by
contract, and Mrs. Wickersham took pride in the fact that it was much
finer than the Wentworth mansion on Washington Square, and more
expensive than the house of the Yorkes, which was one of the big houses
on the avenue, and had been the talk of the town when it was built ten
years before. Will Stirling, one of the wags, said that it was a good
thing that Mr. Wickersham did not take the contract for himself.

Mr. Wickersham, having spent a considerable sum in planning and
preparing his Southern enterprise, and having obtained a charter from
the leg