Mrs. Wallingford, content, viewed Europe with appreciative eyes, and no empress swathed in silk and diadem-crowned ever took more graciously to the pomp with which their royal progress was attended wherever they went. Wallingford's interest in foreign lands, however, had suddenly become a business one. Restless as ever, he moved from place to place with rapid speed, and covered in two months the ground that ordinary tourists above the financial standing of "trippers" would think they had slighted in six. Europe, as a matter of fact, did not please him at all. Its laws were too strict, and he found in nearly every country he visited, that a man, unless he happened to be an innkeeper, was expected to actually deliver value received for every coin that came into his possession! This was so vastly different from the financial and commercial system to which he had been used that he became eager to get back home, and finally, having been visited over night with the inspiration for a brilliant new enterprise, he cabled his bankers to throw open a portion of his account to Blackie Daw, and to the latter gentleman cabled instructions to buy him a good farm in the middle of the wheat belt and fit it for his residence regardless of cost. Then he started back for the land where the money grows. The task he had set Blackie Daw was very much to that gentleman's liking. There had arisen a sudden crisis in his "business affairs," that very morning, which demanded his immediate absence, not only from his office, but from any other spot in which the authorities might be able to find him, and, relieved of his dilemma in the nick of time by Wallingford's money, he immediately put an enormous number of miles between himself and New York. A week he spent in search, and when he found the location which suited him, he set about his task of constructing a Wallingford estate in great glee. He built a big new barn, the finest in the county; he put a new front to the house, bigger than the house itself had been; he brought on load after load of fine furniture; he stocked the big cellar with beer and wines and liquors of all kinds; he piped natural gas from twelve miles away and installed a gas furnace in the cellar and a gas engine in a workshop near the barn; he had electricians wire the place from cellar to attic, including the barn and the front porch and the trees in the front yard, and had a dynamo put in to be run by the gas engine and to illuminate the entire estate; he installed both line and house telephone systems, with extension phones wherever they would be handy, and, his work finished, surveyed it with much satisfaction. With the mail carrier stopping every day, with the traction line running right past the door, and with plenty of money, he decided that J. Rufus would be able to get along, through the winter, at least.