At this point Kate Montgomery, in charge of an entertainment for the benefit of Center Church, invited Hastings (thus providentially flung upon the Hoosier coasts) to give a reading in the church parlors. Almost coincidently the opera house at Montgomery needed a manager, and Hastings accepted the position. The Avon Dramatic Club rose and flourished that winter under Hastings's magic wand. It is not every town of fifteen thousand that suddenly enrolls a Hamlet among her citizens, and as the creator and chief spirit of the dramatic club, Hastings's social acceptance was immediate and complete. In other times the town would have been wary of an actor; but had not Hastings given his services free of charge for the benefit of Center Church, and was he not a gentleman, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, and had he not declined money offered by telegraph that he might cling stubbornly to his art? Kate Montgomery talked a good deal about his art, which he would not relinquish for the boxing of codfish. After Hastings had given a lecture on "Macbeth" (with readings from the play) in the chapel of Madison College, his respectability was established. There was no reason whatever why Kate Montgomery should not marry him; and she did, at the end of his first year in town. He thereupon assumed the theater lease and what had been the old "Grand Opera House" became under his ownership "Hastings's Theater," or "The Hastings." Fanny Montgomery had contented herself with the hand of a young man named Fosdick who had been summoned to town to organize a commercial club. In two years he added several industries to Montgomery's scant list, and wheedled a new passenger station out of one of the lordly railroads that had long held the town in scorn. Two of the industries failed, the new station was cited as an awful example by the Professor of Fine Arts at the college, and yet Paul Fosdick made himself essential to Montgomery. The commercial club's bimonthly dinners gave the solid citizens an excuse for leaving home six nights a year, and in a community where meetings of whist clubs and church boards constituted the only justification for carrying a latch-key this new freedom established him at once as a friend of mankind. Fosdick was wholly presentable, and while his contributions to the industrial glory of Montgomery lacked elements of permanence, he had, so the "Evening Star" solemnly averred, "done much to rouse our citizens from their lethargy and blaze the starward trail." After he married Fanny, Fosdick opened an office adjoining the Commercial Club rooms and his stationery bore the legend "Investment Securities." Judge Walters, in appointing a receiver for a corporation which Fosdick had organized for the manufacture and sale of paving-brick, inadvertently spoke of the promoter's occupation as that of a "dealer in insecurities"; but this playfulness on the court's part did not shake confidence in Fosdick. He was a popular