nce. In the old country,
in a valley below the castle perched on the rack above, he had begun life
by tending his father's geese. What a contrast to "Steeltown" with its
smells and sickening summer heat, to the shanty where Mrs. Scherer took
boarders and bent over the wash-tub! She, too, was an immigrant, but
lived to hear her native Wagner from her own box at Covent Garden; and he
to explain, on the deck of an imperial yacht, to the man who might have
been his sovereign certain processes in the manufacture of steel hitherto
untried on that side of the Atlantic. In comparison with Adolf Scherer,
citizen of a once despised democracy, the minor prince in whose dominions
he had once tended geese was of small account indeed!

The Adolf Scherer of that day--though it is not so long ago as time
flies--was even more solid and impressive than the man he afterwards
became, when he reached the dizzier heights from which he delivered to an
eager press opinions on politics and war, eugenics and woman's suffrage
and other subjects that are the despair of specialists. Had he stuck to
steel, he would have remained invulnerable. But even then he was
beginning to abandon the field of production for that of exploitation:
figuratively speaking, he had taken to soap, which with the aid of water
may be blown into beautiful, iridescent bubbles to charm the eye. Much
good soap, apparently, has gone that way, never to be recovered.
Everybody who was anybody began to blow bubbles about that time, and the
bigger the bubble the greater its attraction for investors of hard-earned
savings. Outside of this love for financial iridescence, let it be
called, Mr. Scherer seemed to care little then for glitter of any sort.
Shortly after his elevation to the presidency of the Boyne Iron Works he
had been elected a member of the Boyne Club,--an honour of which, some
thought, he should have been more sensible; but generally, when in town,
he preferred to lunch at a little German restaurant annexed to a saloon,
where I used often to find him literally towering above the cloth,--for
he was a giant with short legs,--his napkin tucked into his shirt front,
engaged in lively conversation with the ministering Heinrich. The chef at
the club, Mr. Scherer insisted, could produce nothing equal to Heinrich's
sauer-kraut and sausage. My earliest relationship with Mr. Scherer was
that of an errand boy, of bringing to him for his approval papers which
might not be intrust