nda; it echoes down the corridors to the side; it floats, softly
melodious, through the palm trees of the ladies' palm room; it is
heard, fainter and fainter, in the distant grill; and in the depths of
the barber shop below the level of the street the barber arrests a
moment-the drowsy hum of his shampoo brushes to catch the sound--as
might a miner in the sunken galleries of a coastal mine cease in his
toil a moment to hear the distant murmur of the sea.

And the clerks call for the pages, the pages call for the guests, and
the guests call for the porters, the bells clang, the elevators rattle,
till home itself was never half so homelike.

* * * * *

"A call for Mr. Tomlinson! A call for Mr. Tomlinson!"

So went the sound, echoing through the rotunda.

And as the page boy found him and handed him on a salver a telegram to
read, the eyes of the crowd about him turned for a moment to look upon
the figure of Tomlinson, the Wizard of Finance.

There he stood in his wide-awake hat and his long black coat, his
shoulders slightly bent with his fifty-eight years. Anyone who had
known him in the olden days on his bush farm beside Tomlinson's Creek
in the country of the Great Lakes would have recognized him in a
moment. There was still on his face that strange, puzzled look that it
habitually wore, only now, of course, the financial papers were calling
it "unfathomable." There was a certain way in which his eye roved to
and fro inquiringly that might have looked like perplexity, were it not
that the _Financial Undertone_ had recognized it as the "searching look
of a captain of industry." One might have thought that for all the
goodness in it there was something simple in his face, were it not that
the _Commercial and Pictorial Review_ had called the face
"inscrutable," and had proved it so with an illustration that left no
doubt of the matter. Indeed, the face of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's
Creek, now Tomlinson the Wizard of Finance, was not commonly spoken of
as a _face_ by the paragraphers of the Saturday magazine sections, but
was more usually referred to as a mask; and it would appear that
Napoleon the First had had one also. The Saturday editors were never
tired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson,
the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance. From
the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous
Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over