The autumn winds began; winds that in the country bring red leaves, and ripening nuts, and smells of cider, and the crisp white frost; and in the city come with clouds of pungent dust of streets, and sticks and straws, and make one’s daily walk and ride a nuisance, not a pleasure. But all the world, or all the world that Arthur saw, was busied with its dresses and with its future entertainments, and with rejoicings over future marriages, and, now and here, perhaps, regrets, and longer days for women, and sterner work for men. For the beauty of our modern view of life is that it bids no man be content who stays in that position where our simple fathers used to say a wise providence had placed him. Not even our primers have this lesson now; but tell us, with A who is the architect of his own fortunes, how we all may rise in life. We are brought to make light of lessons, too--all lessons, from the first and second down--and the small boy has formed the taste of the nation and dictates its likings not only on the fourth of July; let us have our fun, and jest at all the school-marms and the moral tales. For the school-room’s mimic can make faces long years before the first scholar understands. Terrible indeed must have been the elders of a generation ago, that we kick our heels so high at having gotten loose from them. So the race of life began again; and Charlie Townley on the home stretch, but laboring heavily. Old Mr. Townley came to the office seldomer than ever, this year; but Tamms was there, as regular as the clockwork beat upon a bomb of dynamite. His wiry red mustache was bitten close above his upper lip, and his discreet eyelids more inflamed than ever. And Charlie knew that all their Allegheny Central stock was still held in the office; and the strike seemed no nearer to a settlement than ever. “These labor troubles have played the devil with the market,” he would say to Charlie; “and public confidence is entirely lost.” Tamms depended much on public confidence. And Deacon Remington’s brokers would go into the board and sell their ten thousand shares, day after day, as punctually as doom. “They must have borrowed lots of stocks,” suggested the younger and the smarter Townley. “Can’t we squeeze them?” But wary Tamms would shake his head. A “corner” was a risky boomerang--suchlike manœuvres he was too old a bird to try.