ted with" the staff of the great brokerage firm of Gretry,
Converse and Co. He was astonishingly good-looking, small-made, wiry,
alert, nervous, debonair, with blond hair and dark eyes that snapped
like a terrier's. He made friends almost at first sight, and was one of
those fortunate few who were favoured equally of men and women. The
healthiness of his eye and skin persuaded to a belief in the
healthiness of his mind; and, in fact, Landry was as clean without as
within. He was frank, open-hearted, full of fine sentiments and
exaltations and enthusiasms. Until he was eighteen he had cherished an
ambition to become the President of the United States.

"Yes, yes," he said to Laura, "the bridge was turned. It was an
imposition. We had to wait while they let three tows through. I think
two at a time is as much as is legal. And we had to wait for three.
Yes, sir; three, think of that! I shall look into that to-morrow. Yes,
sir; don't you be afraid of that. I'll look into it." He nodded his
head with profound seriousness.

"Well," announced Mr. Cressler, marshalling the party, "shall we go in?
I'm afraid, Laura, we've missed the overture."

Smiling, she shrugged her shoulders, while they moved to the wicket, as
if to say that it could not be helped now.

Cressler, tall, lean, bearded, and stoop-shouldered, belonging to the
same physical type that includes Lincoln--the type of the Middle
West--was almost a second father to the parentless Dearborn girls. In
Massachusetts, thirty years before this time, he had been a farmer, and
the miller Dearborn used to grind his grain regularly. The two had been
boys together, and had always remained fast friends, almost brothers.
Then, in the years just before the War, had come the great movement
westward, and Cressler had been one of those to leave an "abandoned"
New England farm behind him, and with his family emigrate toward the
Mississippi. He had come to Sangamon County in Illinois. For a time he
tried wheat-raising, until the War, which skied the prices of all
food-stuffs, had made him--for those days--a rich man. Giving up
farming, he came to live in Chicago, bought a seat on the Board of
Trade, and in a few years was a millionaire. At the time of the
Turco-Russian War he and two Milwaukee men had succeeded in cornering
all the visible supply of spring wheat. At the end of the thirtieth day
of the corner the clique figured out its profits at close upon a
million; a week later it