nel Carvel
did not know until after years that Mr. Hopper had been offered the place
which Mr. Doddington filled later.

As for Mr. Hopper, increase of salary had not changed him. He still lived
in the same humble way, in a single room in Miss Crane's boarding-house,
and he paid very little more for his board than he had that first week in
which he swept out Colonel Carvel's store. He was superintendent, now, of
Mr. Davitt's Sunday School, and a church officer. At night, when he came
home from business, he would read the widow's evening paper, and the
Colonel's morning paper at the office. Of true Puritan abstemiousness,
his only indulgence was chewing tobacco. It was as early as 1859 that the
teller of the Boatman's Bank began to point out Mr. Hopper's back to
casual customers, and he was more than once seen to enter the president's
room, which had carpet on the floor.

Eliphalet's suavity with certain delinquent customers from the Southwest
was A wording to Scripture. When they were profane, and invited him into
the street, he reminded them that the city had a police force and a jail.
While still a young man, he had a manner of folding his hands and smiling
which is peculiar to capitalists, and he knew the laws concerning
mortgages in several different states.

But Eliphalet was content still to remain in the sphere in which
Providence had placed him, and so to be an example for many of us. He did
not buy, or even hire, an evening suit. He was pleased to superintend
some of the details for a dance at Christmas-time before Virginia left
Monticello, but he sat as usual on the stair-landing. There Mr. Jacob
Cluyme (who had been that day in conversation with the teller of the
Boatman's Bank) chanced upon him. Mr. Cluyme was so charmed at the
facility with which Eliphalet recounted the rise and fall of sugar and
cotton and wheat that he invited Mr. Hopper to dinner. And from this meal
may be reckoned the first appearance of the family of which Eliphalet
Hopper was the head into polite society. If the Cluyme household was not
polite, it was nothing. Eliphalet sat next to Miss Belle, and heard the
private history of many old families, which he cherished for future use.
Mrs. Cluyme apologized for the dinner, which (if the truth were told)
needed an apology. All of which is significant, but sordid and
uninteresting. Jacob Cluyme usually bought stocks before a rise.

There was only one person who really bothered Eliphalet as