commonplace highway toward riches. The spirit of the West gripped him
in its great, enveloping hands, picked him out of the slough and set
him down again, plump upon his two feet, high and dry, prodding him
violently all the while with a spur that would not permit him to stop
or to take a step backward, with the natural result that he moved
forward--slowly, dazedly at first, and then with a mighty rush.

He had one advantage over most of the men who were being driven
helter-skelter by the grateful lash of the West: he was a trained
money-getter. Back of him were generations of shrewd business men,
while dormant in his own being was the half-stunned thing called
natural ability. The simple shrewdness of Joseph Hooper, combined with
a certain hitherto unconfessed lack of respect for the Golden Rule, to
say nothing of a vain-glorious desire to kick the world that had
kicked him, soon produced opportunities that paved the way for his
rehabilitation.

Without a dollar to his name, with nothing in the shape of resources
save a self-sufficient nerve and an infinite eastern contempt for
these struggling westerners, he began to promote things!

The field was fresh and fertile. Inside of two years he reaped a half-
dozen harvests--and replanted as he went along! First, he promoted a
street railway in a place called Mockawock; then it became necessary
for some one to establish reasons for the existence of such a thing as
a car-line in a town that could be traversed on foot, from one end to
the other, in less than eight minutes; so he began to promote the
organisation of a wagon factory at one extreme and a pickle works at
the other, possessing the far-sightedness to put them so far away from
each other that if one wanted to go to the pickle works from the wagon