The journey being likely to be made once in a lifetime, the traveller’s intention was to see as much as possible, to visit as many cities cathedrals, ruins, galleries, as his time and purse would allow.  People who could speak with any degree of familiarity of Hyde Park, the Champs Elysees, the Pincio, had gained a certain dignity.  The ability to touch with an intimate bearing upon such localities was a raison de plus for being asked out to tea or to dinner.  To possess photographs and relics was to be of interest, to have seen European celebrities even at a distance, to have wandered about the outside of poets’ gardens and philosophers’ houses, was to be entitled to respect.  The period was a far cry from the time when the Shuttle, having shot to and fro, faster and faster, week by week, month by month, weaving new threads into its web each year, has woven warp and woof until they bind far shore to shore.

It was in comparatively early days that the first thread we follow was woven into the web.  Many such have been woven since and have added greater strength than any others, twining the cord of sex and home-building and race-founding.  But this was a slight and weak one, being only the thread of the life of one of Reuben Vanderpoel’s daughters—­the pretty little simple one whose name was Rosalie.

They were—­the Vanderpoels—­of the Americans whose fortunes were a portion of the history of their country.  The building of these fortunes had been a part of, or had created epochs and crises.  Their millions could scarcely be regarded as private property.  Newspapers bandied them about, so to speak, employing them as factors in argument, using them as figures of speech, incorporating them into methods of calculation.  Literature touched upon them, moral systems considered them, stories for the young treated them gravely as illustrative.

The first Reuben Vanderpoel, who in early days of danger had traded with savages for the pelts of wild animals, was the lauded hero of stories of thrift and enterprise.  Throughout his hard-working life he had been irresistibly impelled to action by an absolute genius of commerce, expressing itself at the outset by the exhibition of courage in mere exchange and barter.  An alert power to perceive the potential value of things and the possible malleability of men and circumstances, had stood him in marvellous good stead.  He had bought at low prices things which in the eyes of the less discerning were worthless, but, having obtained possession of such things, the less discerning had almost invariably awakened to the fact that, in his hands, values increased, and methods of remunerative disposition, being sought, were found.  Nothing remained unutilisable.  The practical, sordid, uneducated little man developed the power to create demand for his own supplies.  If he was betrayed into an error, he quickly retrieved it.  He could live upon nothing and consequently could travel anywhere in search of such things as he