o had been clever enough to sit still until a
congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and
hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world, until that
gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of course, possessing what
now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of gifts--since it
reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight. From time to time these
ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners, which no amount of
persuasion had availed to make them relinquish. Lease them, yes; sell
them, never! By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human
necessity; and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.
Mr. Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money, but of investing
it. One became automatically a personage....

It was due to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a
subject for speculation--that the man who revealed to me this golden
romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city,
Mr. Theodore Watling, now become one of our most important and
influential citizens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating
qualification, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs.
That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished me, since I
was as yet to make the connection between that finished, decorous,
secluded existence and the source of its being. The evening before my
departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot
and a Mr. Saxes, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of
which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street. Conybear
informed me that they were "magnates,"... We were sitting in the
drawing-room at tea, when they entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner
had he spoken to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the
group.

"Why, Hugh!" he exclaimed, taking my hand. "I had no idea I should meet
you here--I saw your father only last week, the day I left home." And he
added, turning to Mrs. Kyme, "Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret, who
has been the leader of our bar for many years."

The recognition and the tribute to my father were so graciously given
that I warmed with gratitude and pride, while Mr. Kyme smiled a little,
remarking that I was a friend of Jerry's. Theodore Watling, for being
here, had suddenly assumed in my eyes a considerable consequence, though
the note he struck in that house was a strange one. It was, h