e. I may add that she
looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free
and fresh sort which indicates that a servant feels he or she should
get as high, or higher, wages, and less to do, elsewhere. "I don't
think you can see Mr. Roebuck," she said.

"Take my card to him," I ordered, "and I'll wait in the parlor."

"Parlor's in use," she retorted, with a sarcastic grin, which I was
soon to understand.

So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at
the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his
glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. "Glad to see you,
Matthew," said he, with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand.
"We are just about to offer up our evening prayer. Come right in."

I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were
lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the
Roebucks and the four servants. "This is my friend, Matthew
Blacklock," said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He
drew up a chair for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush,
he read a chapter from the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My
glance wandered from face to face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed
as were their servants. I was able to look freely, mine being the only
eyes not bent upon the floor. It was the first time in my life that I
had witnessed family prayers. When I was a boy at home, my mother had
taken literally a Scriptural injunction to pray in secret--in a
closet, I think the passage of the Bible said. Many times each day she
used to retire to a closet under the stairway and spend from one to
twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family prayers. I was
therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those countrified
parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the world--and
this right in the heart of that district of New York where palaces
stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there are
resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.

It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old
lady, looked like old Roebuck himself--the same smug piety, the same
underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved
soul than a starved body. One difference--where his face had the look
of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless
strength relentlessly used, the