s and assemblies trifled with the middle and
the low. Certainly the history of that year in American finance
indicated no flagging in the powers of Robert H. Norcross.

The change which the Street had marked lay in his face--it had taken on
the subtle imprint of a first frosty day. He had never looked the power
that he was. Short and slight of build, his head was rather small even
for his size, and his features were insignificant--all except the
mouth, whose wide firmness he covered by a drooping mustache, and the
eyes, which betrayed always an inner fire. The trained observer of
faces noticed this, however; every curve of his facial muscles, every
plane of the inner bone-structure, was set by nature definitely and
properly in its place to make a powerful and perfectly cooerdinated
whole. In this facial manifestation of mental powers, he was like one
of those little athletes who, carrying nothing superfluous, show the
power, force and endurance which is in them by no masses of overlying
muscles, but only by a masterful symmetry.

Now, in a year, the change had come over his face--the jump as abrupt
as that by which a young girl grows up--the transition from middle age
to old age. It was not so much that his full, iron-gray hair and
mustache had bleached and silvered. It was more that the cheeks were
falling from middle-aged masses to old-age creases, more that the skin
was drawing up, most that the inner energy which had vitalized his walk
and gestures was his no longer.

In the mind, too--though no one perceived that, he least of all--had
come a change. Here and there, a cell had disintegrated and collapsed.
They were not the cells which vitalized his business sense. They lay
deeper down; it was as though their very disuse for thirty years had
weakened them. In such a cell his consciousness dwelt while he gazed on
Trinity Churchyard, and especially upon that modest shaft of granite,
three graves from the south entrance. And the watch on his desk clicked
off the valuable seconds, and the electric clock on the wall jumped to
mark the passing minutes. "Click-click" from the desk--seventy-eight
cents--"Click-click"--one dollar and fifty-seven cents--"Clack" from
the wall--forty-seven dollars.

Presently, when watch and clock had chronicled four hundred and seventy
dollars of wasted time, he leaned back, looked for a moment on the
brazen September heavens above, and sighed. He might then have turned
back to his desk and