s:
Power to get more power!
Riches to get more riches!
Give me of thy sweat that I may sweat more!
Give me Bigness to get more Bigness to myself,
O Bigness, for Thine is the Power and the Glory! And
there is no end but Bigness, ever and for ever!

CHAPTER II

The Sheridan Building was the biggest skyscraper; the Sheridan Trust
Company was the biggest of its kind, and Sheridan himself had been the
biggest builder and breaker and truster and buster under the smoke. He
had come from a country cross-roads, at the beginning of the growth, and
he had gone up and down in the booms and relapses of that period; but
each time he went down he rebounded a little higher, until finally,
after a year of overwork and anxiety--the latter not decreased by a
chance, remote but possible, of recuperation from the former in the
penitentiary--he found himself on top, with solid substance under
his feet; and thereafter "played it safe." But his hunger to get was
unabated, for it was in the very bones of him and grew fiercer.

He was the city incarnate. He loved it, calling it God's country, as he
called the smoke Prosperity, breathing the dingy cloud with relish. And
when soot fell upon his cuff he chuckled; he could have kissed it. "It's
good! It's good!" he said, and smacked his lips in gusto. "Good, clean
soot; it's our life-blood, God bless it!" The smoke was one of his
great enthusiasms; he laughed at a committee of plaintive housewives who
called to beg his aid against it. "Smoke's what brings your husbands'
money home on Saturday night," he told them, jovially. "Smoke may hurt
your little shrubberies in the front yard some, but it's the catarrhal
climate and the adenoids that starts your chuldern coughing. Smoke makes
the climate better. Smoke means good health: it makes the people wash
more. They have to wash so much they wash off the microbes. You go
home and ask your husbands what smoke puts in their pockets out o' the
pay-roll--and you'll come around next time to get me to turn out more
smoke instead o' chokin' it off!"

It was Narcissism in him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection
in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and
unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out
he believed it was the finest city in the world. "Finest" was his word.
He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family;
and just as profoundly believed his