e
fit of hysteria! At that time we changed the name of the house to Fairy
Fern Cottage. This is why I am so proud and so fond of my cottage home.
This is why I appreciate your praise of it so much--why I am so thankful
for it. I feel sure that you will now appreciate my sincerity when I
repeat that money could not buy it!"

CHAPTER IX.

THE PROBLEM VS. A GOOD MAN WHO IS AS RICH AS HE IS NOBLE.

After supper Fern Fenwick and Fillmore Flagg returned to the tower room
for the continuation of the story. She began by saying:

"Let us return to my father's mining operations in Alaska. In 1892,
Dewitt C. Dunbar assumed the active management of the Martina mine. A
large proportion of my father's surplus capital from the mine had been
invested, through trusty agents, in the cities of San Francisco, Saint
Paul, Chicago, Washington and New York. We at once planned a tour of
travel that would give him the opportunity to personally inspect these
investments, and at the same time give me a chance to see the world,
and to mingle in society, or so much of it as a continuous hotel life
might offer.

"For my mother and myself this delightful tour was one long holiday. We
enjoyed it so much. To me especially, it proved exceedingly profitable;
geographically speaking, my ideas of the largeness of the world, and the
vast number of its people, were wonderfully expanded. In December, 1893,
father completed his investments by the purchase of a winter home in the
city of Washington, and this summer home here. This cottage was built in
the year 1900.

"During the summer of 1894 we visited the brothers and sisters of my
father, who were at that time living with their families on farms in
Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. As was generally the
rule, with a large class of farmers in those states at that time, we
found them, with but few exceptions, poor, in debt, and very much
discouraged by the menacing outlook for the future. Farm interests
everywhere were in a desperate condition. A succession of twenty years
of falling prices for all farm products, accompanied by frequent
calamities, such as hail storms, hurricanes, hot, blighting winds,
drouth and armies of grasshoppers, had so multiplied and magnified the
farm debts, and so reduced the value of farm, stock, and product, that
even the interest on the indebtedness could no longer be kept up; ruin
and beggary threatened the entire community of farmers. Under the sever