to cultivate the intellectual tracts of his brain. The portraits that
hung above, against the dark paneling, were the work of his mother's
father, one of the celebrated portrait painters of his time, and were
replicas of the eminent and mighty he had painted. Maharajas, kings,
emperors, famous diplomats, men of letters, artists of his own small
class, statesmen and several of the famous beauties of their brief day;
these had been the favorite grandson's inheritance from Masewell Price,
and they made an impressive frieze, unique in the splendid homes of the
city of Ruyler's adoption.

He had brought them from New York when he had decided to live in
California, and hung them in his bachelor quarters. He had soon made up
his mind that he must remain in San Francisco for at least ten years if
he would maintain the business he had rescued from the disaster of 1906
at the level where he had, by the severest application of his life,
placed it by the end of 1908. Meanwhile he had grown to like San
Francisco better than he would have believed possible when he arrived in
the wrecked city, still smoking, and haunted with the subtle odors of
fires that had consumed more than products of the vegetable kingdom.

The vast ruin with its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely
walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this
ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole
compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel
and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had
appealed powerfully to his imagination, and made him feel, when wandering
alone at night, as if his brain cells were haunted by old memories of
Antioch when Nature had annihilated in an instant what man had lavished
upon her for centuries. Nowhere, not even in what was left of ancient
Rome, had he ever received such an impression of the age of the world and