class="smcap">"Grinder."

And Mr. van Rensselaer folded the telegram, and put it in his pocket, and smiled. "Damn the newspapers," he said meditatively, and sent his valet to procure some. When he got them he sat on the deck and read them while the cool sea breeze fanned his forehead.

There had been quite a time at Hungerville, so it appeared. The strikers had held meetings; the whole town had been in an uproar. Strange as it might seem, a considerable part of the press had taken the side of the men. There had been no violence, however, until strange faces began to appear in the town, and some old abandoned freight cars outside the mills were burned. Then a force of five hundred detectives were rushed into the mills, and a high fence was put up, with loopholes. On the third day the Company sent up a car load of non-union men—men who had been out of work for a year, since the closing of the mills the Hungerville Company had beaten down. Instantly the town was in an uproar, and in spite of all precautions the "scabs" were stoned and beaten. The detectives fired upon the mob, killing three men, a woman, and two children, and wounding a dozen more; and that same night, the sheriff having appealed to the governor, the first companies of militia arrived.

Following that were three days of furious excitement; on several occasions a pitched battle all but occurred. Twice the soldiers fired on the mob, killing several, and one militiaman was stabbed in the dark. But the Company insisted upon starting the mills; and the strikers being without money, and many of them half-dead with starvation, they gave up in scores. At last reports the union had been on the point of abandoning the strike, so that its members might secure what few places were left.

Then Mr. Robert van Rensselaer read his telegram again, and smiled.

"Tell me, dearest," said Miss Paragon, "what good news have you heard?"

"That you will soon be mine," he answered her.

XVIII

The wedding came off about four months later, after Miss Paragon's Paris trousseau had safely arrived. Just how to describe such a wedding in reasonable space is a problem, for the plans of it were described in the newspapers weeks beforehand,—all the decorations and preparations, as well as the ancestry, possessions, and accomplishments of both bride and groom. The Associated Press sent out two descriptions of the wedding gown,—one technical, by an expert, and one imaginative, by a sympathetic artist. On the day before the wedding the Fifth Avenue church—the church where "Robbie" had taught Sunday-school, and had for thirty years listened to the edifying sermons of the Reverend Doctor Lettuce Spray, the church, with all its marvellous riot of flowers—was pictured with pen and pencil, and after the great event the front pages of all the New York papers were given up to telling an eager and expectant people everything about it that could be described or imagined. By that time, of course, the radical press had forgotten all its vehemence about Hungerville, and Mr. Robert van Rensselaer was again the noted financier, the prominent social light, the eminent citizen, and the inimitable raconteur. After the couple were safely married, and had spent a long honeymoon upon the Comet, and drunk the full cup of their bliss, I remember reading in the New York papers an address which our Robbie had delivered before the Young Men's Mohammedan Association of Podunk, the theme being industrial brotherhood and the community of interest between capital and labor.

XIX

And now will the reader kindly imagine that four or five years more have sped by; and that Mrs. Robert van Rensselaer is a mother of two children, and a proud and majestic social queen,—a grande dame,—wearing serenely the crown of her exalted station; and that Mr. van Rensselaer is more than ever a power in the financial circles of the country, a man able to make governors and senators by the signing of his pen. His affairs have prospered steadily, fortunes springing up at his command like fruit trees beneath the hand of a Hindoo conjurer. He has organized a great corporation of the rivals of his Company for the preventing of ruinous competition; and he has done other things that have left Wall Street equally aghast.

I should venture upon this portion of my hero's career with great trepidation, feeling dubious of my ability to conduct him safely amid the labyrinths of "the street"; but fortunately this story has been told by experts as to whose authority there can be no question, and I avail myself of the opportunity to quote from their narrative. The language of them is somewhat technical, to be sure; but every branch of human science has to have a vocabulary of its own, and the seeker of knowledge has to master it. All van Rensselaer's life in these days was Wall Street life, and it is necessary to give some idea of what manner of life that was.

In Jabbergrab, "Heroes of Finance," p. 1492, one reads as follows:—

"The way that Robert van Rensselaer defended the stock on a certain occasion is still one of the stories of the town. He was in the act of stepping off the Aurora on that immortal Tuesday—after sailing the race of his life—when a messenger handed him a telegram informing him that the bears, evidently underrating the speed of his yacht, had begun one more savage onslaught upon Kalamazoo Airship. There was plainly a conspiracy—the stock was going down by the point. Van Rensselaer immediately wired his brokers to take all the seller's options they could get, and likewise to buy the market bare of all cash stock; so that by the time his special reached New York he was the owner of pretty nearly the whole of K. A. except some he was quite sure would not appear.

"Van Rensselaer was angry, for K. A. was a pet child of his. He had been meditating all the way to the city, and when he arrived, the bear-houses received orders to turn the stock, to buy cash from the cornering party and sell back on buyer's options of a month, the object of which game was that the bears, knowing that van Rensselaer was the defender of the stock, would conclude that he was short of cash, selling for ready money and buying to keep his corner by an option. The trick worked to perfection; the cash stock was taken up by van Rensselaer's own buyers, and the bears, taking new courage, fell upon the stock, and van Rensselaer purchased options in blocks of five and ten thousand, until the bears stopped short from sheer exhaustion.

"And of course he had the money ready, and laughed gleefully while he sprung the trap. The options matured, and behold there was no K. A. on the market! The corner was the kind that one dreams of—the price went up by bounds; it began with 110, and before the market closed men were offering 190, and all in vain. There were sixty thousand shares to be delivered to van Rensselaer, sixty thousand shares that had been sold short at 110, and that now could not be covered at 190!

"They came to him and begged for mercy; and he, generously, told them that they could not have the stock at 190, but that they might compromise and gain time, at the cost of five per cent per day on the par value of the stock. They, not having yet seen through the trick he had played them, and thinking that a break must soon come, were glad to accept. They paid the