Stock Exchange circles,
the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputed
millions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation of
poets.

They all described him. And when each had finished he began again.

"The face," so wrote the editor of the "Our Own Men" section of
_Ourselves Monthly_, "is that of a typical American captain of finance,
hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length,
ductile but not without its own firmness."

"The mouth," so wrote the editor of the "Success" column of _Brains_,
"is strong but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is
something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of
the born leader of men."

So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's
Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and
cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they
used for such occasions, and called it _Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau
capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique_; and the German weeklies,
inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it _Herr
Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrie und Finanzcapitan_. Thus did
Tomlinson float from Tomlinson's Creek beside Lake Erie to the very
banks of the Danube and the Drave.

Some writers grew lyric about him. What visions, they asked, could one
but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that
inscrutable face?

They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key.
Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and
clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in
his hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read the
visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature. They were
simple enough. For the visions in the mind of Tomlinson, Wizard of
Finance, were for the most part those of a wind-swept hillside farm
beside Lake Erie, where Tomlinson's Creek runs down to the low edge of
the lake, and where the off-shore wind ripples the rushes of the
shallow water: that, and the vision of a frame house, and the snake
fences of the fourth concession road where it falls to the lakeside.
And if the eyes of the man are dreamy and abstracted, it is because
there lies over the vision of this vanished farm an infinite regret,
greater in its compass than all the shares the Erie Auriferous
Consolidated has ever thrown upon the market.