my, with plenty of seams,
planned amply, it was thought, to allow the boy to grow. It would do for
twenty-five years, surely. In ten years Haynes-Cooper was bursting its
seams. In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and legs
sticking out of its inadequate garments. New red brick buildings
another--another. Five stories added to this one, six stories to that,
a new fifteen story merchandise building.

The firm began to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became gilt-edged,
unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, discreetly,
with modest visions of four and a half per cent in their unimaginative
minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally
soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at
fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the great plant.
How he juggles figures; how grandly they roll off his tongue. How glib
he is with Nathan Haynes's millions.

"This, ladies and gentlemen, is our mail department. From two thousand
to twenty-five hundred pounds of mail, comprising over one hundred
thousand letters, are received here every day. Yes, madam, I said every
day. About half of these letters are orders. Last year the banking
department counted one hundred and thirty millions of dollars. One
hundred and thirty millions!" He stands there in his ill-fitting coat,
and his star, and rubs one bony hand over the other.

"Dear me!" says a lady tourist from Idaho, rather inadequately. And yet,
not so inadequately. What exclamation is there, please, that fits a sum
like one hundred and thirty millions of anything?

Fanny Brandeis, fresh from Winnebago, Wisconsin, slipped into the great
scheme of things at the Haynes-Cooper plant like part of a perfectly
planned blue print. It was as though she had been thought out and
shaped for this particular corner. And the reason for it was, primarily,
Winnebago, Wisconsin. For Haynes-Cooper grew and thrived on just such
towns, with their surrounding farms and villages. Haynes-Cooper had
their fingers on the pulse and heart of the country as did no other
industry. They were close, close. When rugs began to take the place of
ingrain carpets it was Haynes-Cooper who first sensed the change. Oh,
they had had them in New York years before, certainly. But after all,
it isn't New York's artistic progress that shows the development of this
nation. It is the thing they are thinking, and doing, and learning in
Backwash