were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the
walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted
follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying
the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say,
inevitably, "Those people know good pictures and they know good
books."

The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a
millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it.
When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town
always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the
somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers,
he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house
not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country
place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers
to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce,
all the year round. If he had known how to sit still and let things
happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough,
the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship
Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of
Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the
prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying
bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and
read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building
and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb;
then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to
pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to "keep them up." The lots
refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his
family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully