Eliphalet calculated, if they could come to terms.  And Mr. Barbo keyed himself to enjoyment.

“Single gentlemen,” said she, “pay as high as twelve dollars.”  And she added that they had no cause to complain of her table.

Eliphalet said he guessed he’d have to go somewhere else.  Upon this the lady vouchsafed the explanation that those gentlemen had high positions and rented her large rooms.  Since Mr. Hopper was from Willesden and knew the Salters, she would be willing to take him for less.  Eliphalet said bluntly he would give three and a half.  Barbo gasped.  This particular kind of courage was wholly beyond him.

Half an hour later Eliphalet carried his carpet-bag up three flights and put it down in a tiny bedroom under the eaves, still pulsing with heat waves.  Here he was to live, and eat at Miss Crane’s table for the consideration of four dollars a week.

Such is the story of the humble beginning of one substantial prop of the American Nation.  And what a hackneyed story it is!  How many other young men from the East have travelled across the mountains and floated down the rivers to enter those strange cities of the West, the growth of which was like Jonah’s gourd.

Two centuries before, when Charles Stuart walked out of a window in Whitehall Palace to die; when the great English race was in the throes of a Civil War; when the Stern and the Gay slew each other at Naseby and Marston Moor, two currents flowed across the Atlantic to the New World.  Then the Stern men found the stern climate, and the Gay found the smiling climate.

After many years the streams began to move again, westward, ever westward.  Over the ever blue mountains from the wonderland of Virginia into the greater wonderland of Kentucky.  And through the marvels of the Inland Seas, and by white conestogas threading flat forests and floating over wide prairies, until the two tides met in a maelstrom as fierce as any in the great tawny torrent of the strange Father of Waters.  A city founded by Pierre Laclede, a certain adventurous subject of Louis who dealt in furs, and who knew not Marly or Versailles, was to be the place of the mingling of the tides.  After cycles of separation, Puritan and Cavalier united on this clay-bank in the Louisiana Purchase, and swept westward together—­like the struggle of two great rivers when they meet the waters for a while were dangerous.

So Eliphalet was established, among the Puritans, at Miss Crane’s.  The dishes were to his taste.  Brown bread and beans and pies were plentiful, for it was a land of plenty.  All kinds of Puritans were there, and they attended Mr. Davitt’s Congregational Church.  And may it be added in justice to Mr. Hopper, that he became not the least devout of the boarders.

CHAPTER.  II

THE MOLE