any architect bothering around him, and I don’t know as she did, either.  Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl’s room over that; wide front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor.  It was considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was.  But now, I don’t say but what it’s old-fashioned.  I have to own up to that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make it all right for a while.  I guess we sha’n’t change.”

He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over the top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while contemplating the early monument of his success.  In making my journalistic study, more or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put him down as materially the first man of the place; I might have gone farther and put him down as the first man intellectually.  We folk who have to do more constantly with reading and writing are apt to think that the other folk who have more to do with making and marketing have not so much mind, but I fancy we make a mistake in that now and then.  It is only another kind of mind which they have quite as much of as we have of ours.  It was intellectual force that built up the Plated-Ware Works of Eastridge, where there was no other reason for their being, and it was mental grip that held constantly to the management, and finally grasped the ownership.  Nobody ever said that Talbert had come unfairly into that, or that he had misused his money in buying men after he began to come into it in quantity.  He was felt in a great many ways, though he made something of a point of not being prominent in politics, after being president of the village two terms.  The minister of his church was certainly such a preacher as he liked; and nothing was done in the church society without him; he gave the town a library building, and a soldier’s monument; he was foremost in getting the water brought in, which was natural enough since he needed it the most; he took a great interest in school matters, and had a fight to keep himself off the board of education; he went into his pocket for village improvements whenever he was asked, and he was the chief contributor to the public fountain under the big elm.  If he carefully, or even jealously guarded his own interests, and held the leading law firm in the hollow of his hand, he was not oppressive, to the general knowledge.  He was a despot, perhaps, but he was Blackstone’s ideal of the head of a state, a good despot.  In all his family relations he was of the exemplary perfection which most other men attain only on their tombstones, and I had found him the best of neighbors.  There were some shadows of diffidence between the ladies of our families, mainly on the part of my wife, but none between Talbert and me.  He showed me, as a newspaper man with ideals if not abilities rather above the average, a deference which pleased my wife, even more than me.