For fourteen years this arrangement prospered and progressed--grew greatly in public favor. The store, as we have seen, had passed out of the hands of its original proprietors. Death had claimed four of them--within a short period of barely thirty months. And a new generation had come in. But within a decade of the time that he had entered the organization, one of the partners of this second generation, Mr. Wheeler, was considering leaving it. Colorado had fascinated him. To Colorado he must go. To Colorado he did go. He sold his interest to his partner, Mr. Webster, who in turn sold it to Isidor and Nathan Straus. The crockery counter had absorbed the great store which it had entered so humbly but fourteen years before, as a mere tenant of one of its tiny corners. Now were there indeed real guiding hands upon the enterprise. Force and energy and ability had come to direct the fortunes of what was already probably the largest merchandising establishment within the entire land. A family which had not known failure, save as a spur to repeated efforts, had come into control. It had everything to gain by the venture and it did not propose to lose. The actual consolidation and transfer of interests took place on January 1, 1888. Mr. Webster, as has already been recorded, retained his actual interest in the store until 1896, when he retired, disposing of it to his partners but maintaining an office in their building until his death, in 1916. He gave way deferentially, however, to the Straus energy and Straus experience. The effects of these were visible from the beginning.