If he had known how to sit still and let things
happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough,
the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship
Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of
Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the
prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying
bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and
read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building
and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb;
then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to
pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to "keep them up." The lots
refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his
family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully
the next year) for "traction stock" that was paying dividends; and
thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether
from the commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out
securely on top; and Sheridan, until Mrs.
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