er seen it at all.
He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen
anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was
vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities
attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed
like stories from the Arabian Nights.

"Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please," he said once. "I want
to know what kind of an animal it is."

From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and
Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting. To her
he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product. She had not met and
conversed with young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent
precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous
enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices; they were
even discouraged from hovering about their neighbourhood when seen and
suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible,
disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed,
cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with
delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts attending
it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in
common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel
of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her,
as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the
"hall bedroom" and upon previously unknown phases of business life in
Broadway and roaring "downtown" streets.

His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper under
rebuff and superfluous harshness, his odd, impersonal summing up of men
and things, and good-natured patience with the world in general, were,
she knew, business assets. She was even moved--no less--by the remote
connection of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel who
had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern fortune. The first
Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and known the faces of men as G.
Selden saw and knew them. Fighting his way step by step, knocking
pertinaciously at every gateway which might give ingress to some passage
leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference
only to be overcome by steady and continued assault--if G. Selden was a
nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt worn that aspect upon
innum