ed by the executors of my uncle's will. I felt myself
quite the enchanted princess and put in most of my time dreaming about
the prince. I suppose no girl ever had such wild and impossible notions
of love. That is to say most girls have, but I had peculiar
opportunities for indulgence and elaboration. At the same time I
despised or disliked every man I knew or ever had known--with the
possible exception of Judge Leslie. Not only had I found all the men of
my little personal world weak, or selfish, or tyrannical, but those I
knew almost as well were narrow, or commonplace, or uninterested in
anything but local politics or making money, or both combined. Not but
that Rosewater is the world in little. You never read of any old Italian
duchy where there was more jealousy and intrigue; more silent and tense,
or open and gnashing struggle for supremacy than is centered in these
three banks. They have prevented the town from increasing in size and
importance, in spite of its prosperity, through their machinations
against one another. If a stranger comes to the town intending to invest
his money in some one of the flourishing industries, or to introduce
another, the banker to whom he brings a letter, or whom he happens to
meet first, terrifies him with tales of the rapacity and dishonorable
methods of his rivals; and the other two, who fear that the first will
get the stranger's business, warn him that Mr. Colton, for instance,
never gave an hour's mercy. The three have made slow, sure, dogged
fortunes, but each has prevented the others from becoming millionaires,
and Rosewater from taking its proper place as county seat. And they are
all afraid of new-comers, new capital, of authority passing out of their
hands. They are careful not to charge exorbitant rates of interest, and
every farmer and merchant in the county borrows from them; partly from
habit, partly because the banks are uncommonly sound. They foreclose
without mercy, but that does not frighten their old patrons, who have
the perennial optimism of the country. The only capital they have not
succeeded in frightening off is that controlled by the great
corporations. One or two have wedged their way in and others will follow
in time. Doubtless when the younger men get the reins in their hands
they will trim with the times, but the older seem to be Biblical if not
Christian, and the consequence is that most of the younger have left for
a wider field.

"Finally the day ca