, Nebraska, that marks time for these United States. There may
be a certain significance in the announcement that New York has dropped
the Russian craze and has gone in for that quaint Chinese stuff. My
dear, it makes the loveliest hangings and decorations. When Fifth
Avenue takes down its filet lace and eyelet embroidered curtains, and
substitutes severe shantung and chaste net, there is little in the
act to revolutionize industry, or stir the art-world. But when the
Haynes-Cooper company, by referring to its inventory ledgers, learns
that it is selling more Alma Gluck than Harry Lauder records; when its
statistics show that Tchaikowsky is going better than Irving Berlin,
something epochal is happening in the musical progress of a nation. And
when the orders from Noose Gulch, Nevada, are for those plain dimity
curtains instead of the cheap and gaudy Nottingham atrocities, there is
conveyed to the mind a fact of immense, of overwhelming significance.
The country has taken a step toward civilization and good taste.

So. You have a skeleton sketch of Haynes-Cooper, whose feelers reach the
remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most isolated cabin in the Rockies,
the loneliest ranch-house in Wyoming; the Montana mining shack, the
bleak Maine farm, the plantation in Virginia.

And the man who had so innocently put life into this monster? A
plumpish, kindly-faced man; a bewildered, gentle, unimaginative and
somewhat frightened man, fresh-cheeked, eye-glassed. In his suite of
offices in the new Administration Building--built two years ago--marble
and oak throughout--twelve stories, and we're adding three already;
offices all two-toned rugs, and leather upholstery, with dim, rich,
brown-toned Dutch masterpieces on the walls, he sat helpless and
defenseless while the torrent of millions rushed, and swirled, and
foamed about him. I think he had fancied, fifteen years ago, that he
would some day be a fairly prosperous man; not rich, as riches are
counted nowadays, but with a comfortable number of tens of thousands
tucked away. Two or three hundred thousand; perhaps five hundred
thousand!--perhaps a--but, nonsense! Nonsense!

And then the thing had started. It was as when a man idly throws a
pebble into a chasm, or shoves a bit of ice with the toe of his boot,
and starts a snow-slide that grows as it goes. He had started this
avalanche of money, and now it rushed on of its own momentum, plunging,
rolling, leaping, crashing, and as it