His home was indicative of his personality. It was a square, red-brick house with an octagonal cupola on its top. It boasted a drive and evergreens, and on the lawn stood an alert iron buck. The cupola was painted white and there was a lightning rod which projected glitteringly from the top of it. You knew the lightning rod was not intended to function as a protection against electrical storms as soon as you looked at it. It was not an active lightning rod in any sense. It was a bumptious lightning rod which flaunted itself and its ornamental brass ball, and looked upon itself as quite capping the climax of Abner Fownes’s displayful life. The whole house impressed one as not being intended as a dwelling, but as a display. It was not to live in, but to inform passers-by that here was an edifice, erected at great expense, by a personage. Abner lived there after a fashion, and derived satisfaction from the house and its cupola, but particularly from its lightning rod. An elderly woman kept house for him. Abner never came out of his house--he emerged from it. The act was a ceremony, and one could imagine he visualized himself as issuing forth between rows of bowing servitors, or through a lane of household troops in wonderful uniforms. Always he drove to his office in a surrey, occupying the back seat, erect and conscious, while his unliveried coachman sagged down in the front seat, sitting on his shoulder blades, and quite destroying the effect of solemn state. Abner, however, was not particular about lack of state except in his own person. Perhaps he had arrived at the conclusion that his own person was so impressive as to render negligible the appearance of any contiguous externals.