magnet. Adieu.



NO. IV. FURTHER AUTOBIOGRAPHIC.

(_Eastlake continues apropos of a chance meeting_.)

So you rather like the curious flavor of this new dish, but it puzzles
you. You ask for facts? What a stamp Chicago has put on your soul! You
will continue to regard as facts the feeble fancies that God has allowed
to petrify. I warn you that facts kill, but you shall have them. I had
meditated a delightful sheet of love that has been disdainfully shoved
into the waste-basket. A grave moral there for you, my lady!

Do you remember when I was very young and _gauche_? Doubtless, for women
never forget first impressions of that sort. You dressed very badly, and
were quite ceremonious. I was the bantling son of one of your father's
provincial correspondents, to adopt the suave term of the foreigners. I
had been sent to Chicago to fit for a technical school, where I was to
learn to be very clever about mill machinery. Perhaps you remember my
father--a sweet-natured, wiry, active man, incapable of conceiving an
interest in life that was divorced from respectability. I think he had
some imagination, for now and then he was troubled about my becoming a
loafer. However, he certainly kept it in control: I was to become a great
mill owner.

It was all luck at first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I
found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to be
other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his