the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl
whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an
American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had
been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,
fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;
and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so
hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she kept
silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest
granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of
the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his
financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the
Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of
municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes
that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the
reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was
talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some
day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin
sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a
strike."

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in
Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had
grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years he
lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go
wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth dri