frost, stared out for an instant through the little opening he had made, then resumed as abruptly his nervous pacing with a manner so uneasy and distraught that, since his arrival at the club an hour before, none even among those who knew him best had ventured to speak to him. 

 There are, in every great city, a few individuals who from their fullness of experience in an epoch of the city's life come to epitomize that epoch in the general mind; when one thinks of a city or of a section of the country in more personal terms than its square miles, its towering buildings, and its censused millions, one must think of those individuals. Almost every great industry owns one and seldom more than one; that often enough is not, in a money sense, the predominant figure of his industry; others of his rivals or even of his partners may be actually more powerful than he; but he is the personality; he represents to the outsiders the romance and mystery of the secrets and early, naked adventures of the great achievement. Thus, to think of the great mercantile establishments of State Street is to think immediately of one man; another very vivid and picturesque personality stands for the stockyards; another rises from the wheat pit; one more from the banks; one from the steel works. The man who was pacing restlessly and alone the rooms of the Fort Dearborn Club on this stormy afternoon was the man who, to most people, bodied forth the life underlying all other commerce thereabouts but the least known, the life of the lakes. 

 The lakes, which mark unmistakably those who get their living from them, had put their marks on him. Though he was slight in frame with a spare, almost ascetic leanness, he had the wiry strength and endurance of the man whose youth had been passed upon the water. He was very close to sixty now, but his thick, straight hair was still jet black except for a slash of pure white above one temple; his brows were black above his deep blue eyes. Unforgettable eyes, they were; they gazed at one directly with surprising, disconcerting intrusion into one's thoughts; then, before amazement altered to resentment, one realized that, though he was still gazing, his eyes were vacant with speculation—a strange, lonely withdrawal into himself. His acquaintances, in explaining him to strangers, said he had lived too much by himself of late; he and one man servant shared the great house which had been unchanged—and in which nothing appeared to have been worn out or have needed replacing—since his wife left him, suddenly and unaccountably, about twenty years before. At that time he had looked much the same as now; since then, the white slash upon his temple had grown 

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