The Place was in the North Jersey hinterland, backed by miles of hill and forest, facing the lake that divided it from the village and the railroad and the other new-made smears which had been daubed upon Mother Nature's smiling face in the holy name of Civilization. The lonely situation of The Place made Lad's self-appointed guardianship of its acres no sinecure at all. The dread of his name spread far--carried by hobo and by less harmless intruder. Ten miles to northward of The Place, among the mountains of this same North Jersey hinterland, a man named Glure had bought a rambling old wilderness farm. By dint of much money, more zeal and most dearth of taste, he had caused the wilderness to blossom like the Fifth Proposition of Euclid. He had turned bosky wildwood into chaste picnic-grove plaisaunces, lush meadows into sunken gardens, a roomy colonial farmstead into something between a feudal castle and a roadhouse. And, looking on his work, he had seen that it was good. This Beautifier of the Wilderness was a financial giantlet, who had lately chosen to amuse himself, after work-hours, by what he called "farming." Hence the purchase and renovation of the five hundred-acre tract, the building of model farms, the acquisition of priceless livestock, and the hiring of a battalion of skilled employees. Hence, too, his dearly loved and self-given title of "Wall Street Farmer." His name, I repeat, was Glure. Having established himself in the region, the Wall Street Farmer undertook most earnestly to reproduce the story-book glories of the life supposedly led by mid-Victorian country gentlemen. Not only in respect to keeping open-house and in alternately patronizing and bullying the peasantry, but in filling his gun-room shelves with cups and other trophies won by his livestock. To his "open house" few of the neighboring families came. The local peasantry--Jersey mountaineers of Revolutionary stock, who had not the faintest idea they were "peasantry" and who, indeed, had never heard of the word--alternately grinned and swore at the Wall Street Farmer's treatment of them, and mulcted him of huge sums for small services. But Glure's keenest disappointment--a disappointment that crept gradually up toward the monomania point--was the annoyingly continual emptiness of his trophy-shelves. When, for instance, he sent to the Paterson Livestock Show a score of his pricelessly imported merino sheep, under his more pricelessly imported Scotch shepherd, Mr. McGillicuddy--the sheep came ambling back to Glure Towers Farm bearing no worthier guerdon than a single third-prize yellow silk rosette and a "Commended" ribbon. First and second prizes, as well as the challenge cup had gone to flocks owned by vastly inferior folk--small farmers who had no money wherewith to import the pick of the Scottish moors--farmers who had bred and developed their own sheep, with no better aid than personal care and personal judgment.