These things, of course,--the house, the park, and the fountain,--represent John Barclay and his money. The town is proud of them, but the reader is advised not to expect too much of them. One of the two things really worth seeing at the Ridge is the view over the wheat fields of the Sycamore Valley from the veranda of the Culpepper home on the hill. There one may see the great fields lying in three townships whereon John Barclay founded his fortune. The second thing worth seeing may be found in the hallway of the public library building, just at the turn of the marble stairway, where the morning light strikes it. Take the night train out of Chicago and get to the Ridge in the morning, to get the light on that picture. It is a portrait of John Barclay, done when he was forty years old and painted by a Russian during the summer when the Barclays were called home from Europe before their journey was half completed, to straighten out an obstreperous congressman, one Tom Wharton by name, who was threatening to put wheat and flour on the free list in a tariff bill, unless--but that is immaterial, except that Wharton was on Barclay's mind more or less while the painter was at work, and the portrait reflects what Barclay thought of a number of things. It shows a small gray-clad man, with a pearl pin in a black tie, sitting rather on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, so that the head is thrown into the light. The eyes are well opened, and the jaw comes out, a hard mean jaw; but the work of the artist, the real work that reveals the soul of the sitter, is shown in three features, if we except the pugnacious shoulders. In the face are two of these features: the mouth, a hard, coarse, furtive mouth,--the mouth of the liar who is not polished,--the peasant liar who has been caught and has brazened it out; the mouth and the forehead, full almost to bulging, so clean and white and naked that it seems shameful to expose it, a poet's forehead, noble and full of dreams, broad over the eyes, and as delicately modelled at the temples as a woman's where the curly brown hair is brushed away from it. But the wonderful feature about the portrait is the right hand. The artist obviously asked Barclay to assume a natural attitude, and then seeing him lean forward with his hand stretched out in some gesture of impatience, persuaded him to take that pose. It is the sort of vital human thing that would please Barclay--no sham about it; but he did not realize what the Russian was putting into that hand--a long, hard, hairy, hollow, grasping, relentless hand, full in the foreground and squarely in the light--a horrible thing with artistic fingers, and a thin, greedy palm indicated by the deep hump in the back. It reaches out from the picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the