University of Virginia Library

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM.

I.

When Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas
Lapham for the "Solid Men of Boston" series, which
he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he
replaced their original projector on that newspaper,
Lapham received him in his private office by previous
appointment.

"Walk right in!" he called out to the journalist,
whom he caught sight of through the door of the
counting-room.

He did not rise from the desk at which he was
writing, but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome,
and he rolled his large head in the direction of a
vacant chair. "Sit down! I'll be with you in just
half a minute."

"Take your time," said Bartley, with the ease he
instantly felt. "I'm in no hurry." He took a notebook
from his pocket, laid it on his knee, and began
to sharpen a pencil.

"There!" Lapham pounded with his great hairy
fist on the envelope he had been addressing.

"William!" he called out, and he handed the letter
to a boy who came to get it. "I want that to go
right away. Well, sir," he continued, wheeling
round in his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and
facing Bartley, seated so near that their knees almost
touched, "so you want my life, death, and Christian
sufferings, do you, young man?"

"That's what I'm after," said Bartley. "Your
money or your life."

"I guess you wouldn't want my life without the
money," said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong
these moments of preparation.

"Take 'em both," Bartley suggested. "Don't
want your money without your life, if you come to
that. But you're just one million times more interesting
to the public than if you hadn't a dollar; and
you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham. There's
no use beating about the bush."

"No," said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put
out his huge foot and pushed the ground-glass door
shut between his little den and the book-keepers, in
their larger den outside.

"In personal appearance," wrote Bartley in the
sketch for which he now studied his subject, while
he waited patiently for him to continue, "Silas
Lapham is a fine type of the successful American.
He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed
by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the
edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short
and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather
than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them

that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He
is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair
with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview
was unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue
serge. His head droops somewhat from a short
neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far from
a pair of massive shoulders."

"I don't know as I know just where you want me
to begin," said Lapham.

"Might begin with your birth; that's where most
of us begin," replied Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into
Lapham's blue eyes.

"I didn't know whether you wanted me to go
quite so far back as that," he said. "But there's no
disgrace in having been born, and I was born in the
State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada
line—so well up, in fact, that I came very near
being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an
American of some sort, from the word Go! That
was about—well, let me see!—pretty near sixty
years ago: this is '75, and that was '20. Well, say
I'm fifty-five years old; and I've lived 'em, too; not
an hour of waste time about me, anywheres! I was
born on a farm, and—"

"Worked in the fields summers and went to school
winters: regulation thing?" Bartley cut in.

"Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this
irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly.

"Parents poor, of course," suggested the journalist.
"Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any

kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to
go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know,"
said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with
quiet self-respect, "I guess if you see these things as
a joke, my life won't interest you."

"Oh yes, it will," returned Bartley, unabashed.
"You'll see; it'll come out all right." And in fact
it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.

"Mr. Lapham," he wrote, "passed rapidly over the
story of his early life, its poverty and its hardships,
sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted
mother, and a father who, if somewhat her inferior
in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement
of his children. They were quiet, unpretentious
people, religious, after the fashion of that time, and
of sterling morality, and they taught their children
the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor
Richard's Almanac."

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he
trusted to Lapham's unliterary habit of mind for his
security in making it, and most other people would
consider it sincere reporter's rhetoric.

"You know," he explained to Lapham, "that we
have to look at all these facts as material, and we
get the habit of classifying them. Sometimes a
leading question will draw out a whole line of facts
that a man himself would never think of." He
went on to put several queries, and it was from
Lapham's answers that he generalised the history of
his childhood. "Mr. Lapham, although he did not

dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of
them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their
reality." This was what he added in the interview,
and by the time he had got Lapham past the period
where risen Americans are all pathetically alike in
their narrow circumstances, their sufferings, and
their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness
of the check he had received, and had him
talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.

"Yes, sir," said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley
was careful not to interrupt again, "a man never
sees all that his mother has been to him till it's too
late to let her know that he sees it. Why, my
mother—" he stopped. "It gives me a lump in
the throat," he said apologetically, with an attempt
at a laugh. Then he went on: "She was a little,
frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate
school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family
of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She
cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended
from daylight till dark—and from dark till daylight,
I was going to say; for I don't know how she got
any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She
got time to go to church, and to teach us to read
the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way.
She was good. But it ain't her on her knees in church
that comes back to me so much like the sight of an
angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing
my poor, dirty little feet, that I'd run bare in all
day, and making me decent for bed. There were six

of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size;
and she was just so careful with all of us. I can
feel her hands on my feet yet!" Bartley looked at
Lapham's No. 10 boots, and softly whistled through
his teeth. "We were patched all over; but we
wa'n't ragged. I don't know how she got through
it. She didn't seem to think it was anything; and
I guess it was no more than my father expected of
her. He worked like a horse in doors and out—up
at daylight, feeding the stock, and groaning round
all day with his rheumatism, but not stopping."

Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably,
if he could have spoken his mind, he would
have suggested to Lapham that he was not there
for the purpose of interviewing his ancestry. But
Bartley had learned to practise a patience with his
victims which he did not always feel, and to feign
an interest in their digressions till he could bring
them up with a round turn.

"I tell you," said Lapham, jabbing the point of
his penknife into the writing-pad on the desk before
him, "when I hear women complaining nowadays
that their lives are stunted and empty, I want to
tell 'em about my mother's life. I could paint it out
for 'em."

Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint,
and cut in. "And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you
discovered this mineral paint on the old farm yourself?"

Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. "I
didn't discover it," he said scrupulously. "My

father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree
blowing down. There it was, lying loose in the pit,
and sticking to the roots that had pulled up a big
cake of dirt with 'em. I don't know what give him
the idea that there was money in it, but he did
think so from the start. I guess, if they'd had the
word in those days, they'd considered him pretty
much of a crank about it. He was trying as long
as he lived to get that paint introduced; but he
couldn't make it go. The country was so poor they
couldn't paint their houses with anything; and father
hadn't any facilities. It got to be a kind of joke
with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much
as any one thing to make us boys clear out as soon
as we got old enough. All my brothers went West,
and took up land; but I hung on to New England,
and I hung on to the old farm, not because the
paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was
—and the graves. Well," said Lapham, as if unwilling
to give himself too much credit, "there wouldn't
been any market for it, anyway. You can go
through that part of the State and buy more farms
than you can shake a stick at for less money than it
cost to build the barns on 'em. Of course, it's turned
out a good thing. I keep the old house up in good
shape, and we spend a month or so there every
summer. M' wife kind of likes it, and the girls.
Pretty place; sightly all round it. I've got a force
of men at work there the whole time, and I've got
a man and his wife in the house. Had a family
meeting there last year; the whole connection from
out West. There!" Lapham rose from his seat and
took down a large warped, unframed photograph
from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it,
and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of
the dust. "There we are, all of us."

"I don't need to look twice at you," said Bartley,
putting his finger on one of the heads.

"Well, that's Bill," said Lapham, with a gratified
laugh. "He's about as brainy as any of us, I guess.
He's one of their leading lawyers, out Dubuque
way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or
twice. That's his son—just graduated at Yale—
alongside of my youngest girl. Good-looking chap,
ain't he?"

"She's a good-looking chap," said Bartley, with
prompt irreverence. He hastened to add, at the
frown which gathered between Lapham's eyes,
"What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely,
refined, sensitive face! And she looks good, too."

"She is good," said the father, relenting.

"And, after all, that's about the best thing in a
woman," said the potential reprobate. "If my wife
wasn't good enough to keep both of us straight, I
don't know what would become of me."

"My other daughter," said Lapham, indicating
a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face of
singular gravity. "Mis' Lapham," he continued,
touching his wife's effigy with his little finger. "My
brother Willard and his family—farm at Kankakee.
Hazard Lapham and his wife—Baptist preacher in
Kansas. Jim and his three girls—milling business

at Minneapolis. Ben and his family—practising
medicine in Fort Wayne."

The figures were clustered in an irregular group
in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness
had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham's own
paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza.
The photographer had not been able to conceal the
fact that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible
people, with a very fair share of beauty among the
young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in
fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained
attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they
had the instrument of torture which photographers
call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there
an elderly lady's face was a mere blur; and some of
the younger children had twitched themselves into
wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs
of their own little ghosts. It was the
standard family-group photograph, in which most
Americans have figured at some time or other; and
Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it. "I presume,"
he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of
his desk, "that we sha'n't soon get together again,
all of us."

"And you say," suggested Bartley, "that you
stayed right along on the old place, when the rest
cleared out West?"

"No o-o-o," said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl;
"I cleared out West too, first off. Went to Texas.
Texas was all the cry in those days. But I got
enough of the Lone Star in about three months, and

I come back with the idea that Vermont was good
enough for me."

"Fatted calf business?" queried Bartley, with his
pencil poised above his note-book.

"I presume they were glad to see me," said
Lapham, with dignity. "Mother," he added gently,
"died that winter, and I stayed on with father. I
buried him in the spring; and then I came down to
a little place called Lumberville, and picked up what
jobs I could get. I worked round at the saw-mills,
and I was ostler a while at the hotel—I always did
like a good horse. Well, I wa'n't exactly a college
graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to
driving the stage after while, and by and by I bought
the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired
the tavern-stand, and—well to make a long story
short, then I got married. Yes," said Lapham, with
pride, "I married the school-teacher. We did pretty
well with the hotel, and my wife she was always at
me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and put it off, as
a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, `Well,
let's paint up. Why, Pert,'—m'wife's name's Persis,
—`I've got a whole paint-mine out on the farm.
Let's go out and look at it.' So we drove out. I'd
let the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a
shif'less kind of a Kanuck that had come down that
way; and I'd hated to see the house with him in it;
but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we
brought back about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat,
and I tried it crude, and I tried it burnt; and
I liked it. M'wife she liked it too. There wa'n't

any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it
myself. Well, sir, that tavern's got that coat of
paint on it yet, and it hain't ever had any other, and
I don't know's it ever will. Well, you know, I felt
as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all
the while; and I presume I shouldn't have tried it,
but I kind of liked to do it because father'd always
set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I'd
got the first coat on,"—Lapham called it cut,—"I
presume I must have set as much as half an hour,
looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed
it. I've had my share of luck in this world, and I
ain't a-going to complain on my own account, but I've
noticed that most things get along too late for most
people. It made me feel bad, and it took all the
pride out my success with the paint, thinking of
father. Seemed to me I might 'a taken more interest
in it when he was by to see; but we've got to
live and learn. Well, I called my wife out,—I'd
tried it on the back of the house, you know,—and
she left her dishes,—I can remember she came out
with her sleeves rolled up and set down alongside of
me on the trestle,—and says I, `What do you think,
Persis?' And says she, `Well, you hain't got a
paint-mine, Silas Lapham; you've got a gold-mine.'
She always was just so enthusiastic about things.
Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt
up out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was
a great cry about non-inflammable paint, and I guess
that was what was in her mind. `Well, I guess it
ain't any gold-mine, Persis,' says I; `but I guess it
is a paint-mine. I'm going to have it analysed, and
if it turns out what I think it is, I'm going to work
it. And if father hadn't had such a long name, I
should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint.
But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg,
and every bottle, and every package, big or little,
has got to have the initials and figures N. L. f. 1835,
S. L. t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and
I tried it in 1855.' "

" `S. T.—1860—X.' business," said Bartley.

"Yes," said Lapham, "but I hadn't heard of
Plantation Bitters then, and I hadn't seen any of
the fellow's labels. I set to work and I got a man
down from Boston; and I carried him out to the
farm, and he analysed it—made a regular job of it.
Well, sir, we built a kiln, and we kept a lot of that
paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the
Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence of
iron in the ore showed with the magnet from the
start; and when he came to test it, he found out
that it contained about seventy-five per cent. of the
peroxide of iron."

Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with
a sort of reverent satisfaction, as if awed through
his pride by a little lingering uncertainty as to
what peroxide was. He accented it as if it were
purr-ox-eyed; and Bartley had to get him to
spell it.

"Well, and what then?" he asked, when he had
made a note of the percentage.

"What then?" echoed Lapham. "Well, then,

the fellow set down and told me, `You've got a
paint here,' says he, `that's going to drive every
other mineral paint out of the market. Why,'
says he, `it'll drive 'em right into the Back Bay!'
Of course, I didn't know what the Back Bay was
then; but I begun to open my eyes; thought I'd
had 'em open before, but I guess I hadn't. Says
he, `That paint has got hydraulic cement in it, and
it can stand fire and water and acids;' he named
over a lot of things. Says he, `It'll mix easily with
linseed oil, whether you want to use it boiled or
raw; and it ain't a-going to crack nor fade any;
and it ain't a-going to scale. When you've got
your arrangements for burning it properly, you're
going to have a paint that will stand like the
everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.'
Then he went into a lot of particulars, and I begun
to think he was drawing a long-bow, and meant to
make his bill accordingly. So I kept pretty cool;
but the fellow's bill didn't amount to anything
hardly—said I might pay him after I got going;
young chap, and pretty easy; but every word he
said was gospel. Well, I ain't a-going to brag up
my paint; I don't suppose you came here to hear
me blow—"

"Oh yes, I did," said Bartley. "That's what I
want. Tell all there is to tell, and I can boil it
down afterward. A man can't make a greater mistake
with a reporter than to hold back anything
out of modesty. It may be the very thing we want
to know. What we want is the whole truth; and

more; we've got so much modesty of our own that
we can temper almost any statement."

Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this
tone, and he resumed a little more quietly. "Oh,
there isn't really very much more to say about the
paint itself. But you can use it for almost anything
where a paint is wanted, inside or out. It'll prevent
decay, and it'll stop it, after it's begun, in tin or
iron. You can paint the inside of a cistern or a
bath-tub with it, and water won't hurt it; and you
can paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won't.
You can cover a brick wall with it, or a railroad
car, or the deck of a steamboat, and you can't do a
better thing for either."

"Never tried it on the human conscience, I
suppose," suggested Bartley.

"No, sir," replied Lapham gravely. "I guess
you want to keep that as free from paint as you can,
if you want much use of it. I never cared to try
any of it on mine." Lapham suddenly lifted his
bulk up out of his swivel-chair, and led the way out
into the wareroom beyond the office partitions,
where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs
stretched dimly back to the rear of the building, and
diffused an honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and
paint. They were labelled and branded as containing
each so many pounds of Lapham's Mineral Paint,
and each bore the mystic devices, N. L. f. 1835—S.
L. t. 1855. "There!" said Lapham, kicking one of
the largest casks with the toe of his boot, "that's
about our biggest package; and here," he added,

laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very
small keg, as if it were the head of a child, which it
resembled in size, "this is the smallest. We used
to put the paint on the market dry, but now we
grind every ounce of it in oil—very best quality of
linseed oil—and warrant it. We find it gives more
satisfaction. Now, come back to the office, and I'll
show you our fancy brands."

It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom,
with the rafters showing overhead in a cloudy
perspective, and darkening away into the perpetual
twilight at the rear of the building; and Bartley
had found an agreeable seat on the head of a half-barrel
of the paint, which he was reluctant to leave.
But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of
Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long
summer afternoon was just beginning to glare in at
the window. On shelves opposite Lapham's desk
were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering
cylinders, and showing, in a pattern diminishing
toward the top, the same label borne by the casks
and barrels in the wareroom. Lapham merely
waved his hand toward these; but when Bartley,
after a comprehensive glance at them, gave his
whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars,
where different tints of the paint showed through
flawless glass, Lapham smiled, and waited in pleased
expectation.

"Hello!" said Bartley. "That's pretty!"

"Yes," assented Lapham, "it is rather nice. It's
our latest thing, and we find it takes with customers

first-rate. Look here!" he said, taking down one of
the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.

Bartley read, "THE PERSIS BRAND," and
then he looked at Lapham and smiled.

"After her, of course," said Lapham. "Got it
up and put the first of it on the market her last
birthday. She was pleased."

"I should think she might have been," said
Bartley, while he made a note of the appearance of
the jars.

"I don't know about your mentioning it in your
interview," said Lapham dubiously.

"That's going into the interview, Mr. Lapham,
if nothing else does. Got a wife myself, and I know
just how you feel." It was in the dawn of Bartley's
prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles
with Marcia had seriously begun.

"Is that so?" said Lapham, recognising with a
smile another of the vast majority of married
Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the
rest think them supernal in intelligence and capability.
"Well," he added, "we must see about
that. Where'd you say you lived?"

"We don't live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13
Canary Place."

"Well, we've all got to commence that way," suggested
Lapham consolingly.

"Yes; but we've about got to the end of our
string. I expect to be under a roof of my own on
Clover Street before long. I suppose," said Bartley,
returning to business, "that you didn't let the grass

grow under your feet much after you found out what
was in your paint-mine?"

"No, sir," answered Lapham, withdrawing his
eyes from a long stare at Bartley, in which he had
been seeing himself a young man again, in the first
days of his married life. "I went right back to
Lumberville and sold out everything, and put all I
could rake and scrape together into paint. And
Mis' Lapham was with me every time. No hang
back about her. I tell you she was a woman!"

Bartley laughed. "That's the sort most of us
marry."

"No, we don't," said Lapham. "Most of us
marry silly little girls grown up to look like women."

"Well, I guess that's about so," assented Bartley,
as if upon second thought.

"If it hadn't been for her," resumed Lapham,
"the paint wouldn't have come to anything. I used
to tell her it wa'n't the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed
of iron in the ore that made that paint go;
it was the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of
iron in her."

"Good!" cried Bartley. "I'll tell Marcia that."

"In less 'n six months there wa'n't a board-fence,
nor a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor
a face of rock in that whole region that didn't have
`Lapham's Mineral Paint—Specimen' on it in the
three colours we begun by making." Bartley had
taken his seat on the window-sill, and Lapham,
standing before him, now put up his huge foot close
to Bartley's thigh; neither of them minded that.

"I've heard a good deal of talk about that
S. T.—1860—X. man, and the stove-blacking man,
and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised
in that way; and I've read articles about it in
the papers; but I don't see where the joke comes
in, exactly. So long as the people that own the
barns and fences don't object, I don't see what the
public has got to do with it. And I never saw
anything so very sacred about a big rock, along
a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn't do to put
mineral paint on it in three colours. I wish some
of the people that talk about the landscape, and
write about it, had to bu'st one of them rocks out of
the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury
it in, as we used to have to do up on the farm; I
guess they'd sing a little different tune about the
profanation of scenery. There ain't any man enjoys
a sightly bit of nature—a smooth piece of interval
with half a dozen good-sized wine-glass elms in it—
more than I do. But I ain't a-going to stand up for
every big ugly rock I come across, as if we were all
a set of dumn Druids. I say the landscape was
made for man, and not man for the landscape."

"Yes," said Bartley carelessly; "it was mad for
the stove-polish man and the kidney-cure man."

"It was made for any man that knows how to use
it," Lapham returned, insensible to Bartley's irony.
"Let 'em go and live with nature in the winter,
up there along the Canada line, and I guess they'll get
enough of her for one while. Well—where was

"Decorating the landscape," said Bartley.

"Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville,
and it give the place a start too. You won't find it
on the map now; and you won't find it in the gazetteer.
I give a pretty good lump of money to build
a town-hall, about five years back, and the first
meeting they held in it they voted to change the
name,—Lumberville wa'n't a name,—and it's Lapham
now."

"Isn't it somewhere up in that region that they
get the old Brandon red?" asked Bartley.

"We're about ninety miles from Brandon. The
Brandon's a good paint," said Lapham conscientiously.
"Like to show you round up at our place
some odd time, if you get off."

"Thanks. I should like it first-rate. Works
there?"

"Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the
time I got started, the war broke out; and it
knocked my paint higher than a kite. The thing
dropped perfectly dead. I presume that if I'd had
any sort of influence, I might have got it into Government
hands, for gun-carriages and army wagons,
and may be on board Government vessels. But I
hadn't, and we had to face the music. I was about
broken-hearted, but m'wife she looked at it another
way. `I guess it's a providence,' says she. `Silas,
I guess you've got a country that's worth fighting
for. Any rate, you better go out and give it a
chance.' Well, sir, I went. I knew she meant
business. It might kill her to have me go, but it
would kill her sure if I stayed. She was one of that

kind. I went. Her last words was, `I'll look
after the paint, Si.' We hadn't but just one little
girl then,—boy'd died,—and Mis' Lapham's mother
was livin' with us; and I knew if times did anyways
come up again, m'wife 'd know just what to do.
So I went. I got through; and you can call me
Colonel, if you want to. Feel there!" Lapham
took Bartley's thumb and forefinger and put them
on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee. "Anything
hard?"

"Ball?"

Lapham nodded. "Gettysburg. That's my thermometer.
If it wa'n't for that, I shouldn't know
enough to come in when it rains."

Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some
evidences of wear. "And when you came back,
you took hold of the paint and rushed it."

"I took hold of the paint and rushed it—all I
could," said Lapham, with less satisfaction than he
had hitherto shown in his autobiography. "But I
found that I had got back to another world. The
day of small things was past, and I don't suppose it
will ever come again in this country. My wife was
at me all the time to take a partner—somebody with
capital; but I couldn't seem to bear the idea. That
paint was like my own blood to me. To have anybody
else concerned in it was like—well, I don't
know what. I saw it was the thing to do; but I
tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off. I
used to say, `Why didn't you take a partner yourself,
Persis, while I was away?' And she'd say,

`Well, if you hadn't come back, I should, Si.'
Always did like a joke about as well as any woman
I ever saw. Well, I had to come to it. I took a
partner." Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with
which he had been till now staring into Bartley's
face, and the reporter knew that here was a place
for asterisks in his interview, if interviews were
faithful. "He had money enough," continued
Lapham, with a suppressed sigh; "but he didn't
know anything about paint. We hung on together
for a year or two. And then we quit."

"And he had the experience," suggested Bartley,
with companionable ease.

"I had some of the experience too," said Lapham,
with a scowl; and Bartley divined, through the
freemasonry of all who have sore places in their
memories, that this was a point which he must not
touch again.

"And since that, I suppose, you've played it
alone."

"I've played it alone."

"You must ship some of this paint of yours
to foreign countries, Colonel?" suggested Bartley,
putting on a professional air.

"We ship it to all parts of the world. It goes
to South America, lots of it. It goes to Australia,
and it goes to India, and it goes to China, and it goes
to the Cape of Good Hope. It'll stand any climate.
Of course, we don't export these fancy brands
much. They're for home use. But we're introducing
them elsewhere. Here." Lapham pulled

open a drawer, and showed Bartley a lot of labels in
different languages—Spanish, French, German, and
Italian. "We expect to do a good business in all
those countries. We've got our agencies in Cadiz
now, and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn.
It's a thing that's bound to make its way. Yes, sir.
Wherever a man has got a ship, or a bridge, or a
dock, or a house, or a car, or a fence, or a pig-pen
anywhere in God's universe to paint, that's the paint
for him, and he's bound to find it out sooner or later.
You pass a ton of that paint dry through a blast-furnace,
and you'll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron.
I believe in my paint. I believe it's a blessing to
the world. When folks come in, and kind of smell
round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say,
`Well, in the first place, I mix it with Faith, and
after that I grind it up with the best quality of
boiled linseed oil that money will buy.' "

Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and
Bartley perceived that his audience was drawing to
a close. " 'F you ever want to run down and take
a look at our works, pass you over the road,"—he
called it rud,—"and it sha'n't cost you a cent."

"Well, may be I shall, sometime," said Bartley.
"Good afternoon, Colonel."

"Good afternoon. Or—hold on! My horse down
there yet, William?" he called to the young man in
the counting-room who had taken his letter at the
beginning of the interview. "Oh! All right!" he
added, in response to something the young man said.
"Can't I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard?

I've got my horse at the door, and I can drop you
on my way home. I'm going to take Mis' Lapham
to look at a house I'm driving piles for, down on the
New Land."

"Don't care if I do," said Bartley.

Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some
papers lying on his desk, pulled down its rolling
cover, turned the key in it, and gave the papers
to an extremely handsome young woman at one
of the desks in the outer office. She was stylishly
dressed, as Bartley saw, and her smooth, yellow hair
was sculpturesquely waved over a low, white forehead.
"Here," said Lapham, with the same prompt
gruff kindness that he had used in addressing the
young man, "I want you should put these in shape,
and give me a type-writer copy to morrow."

"What an uncommonly pretty girl!" said Bartley,
as they descended the rough stairway and found
their way out to the street, past the dangling rope
of a block and tackle wandering up into the cavernous
darkness overhead.

"She does her work," said Lapham shortly.

Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy
standing at the curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering
up the hitching-weight, slid it under the buggy-seat
and mounted beside him.

"No chance to speed a horse here, of course,"
said Lapham, while the horse with a spirited gentleness
picked her way, with a high, long action, over
the pavement of the street. The streets were all narrow,
and most of them crooked, in that quarter of

the town; but at the end of one the spars of a vessel
pencilled themselves delicately against the cool blue
of the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell
pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of
oil. It was not the busy season, and they met only
two or three trucks heavily straggling toward the
wharf with their long string teams; but the cobblestones
of the pavement were worn with the dint of
ponderous wheels, and discoloured with iron-rust
from them; here and there, in wandering streaks
over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water
with which the street had been sprinkled.

After an interval of some minutes, which both men
spent in looking round the dash-board from opposite
sides to watch the stride of the horse, Bartley said,
with a light sigh, "I had a colt once down in Maine
that stepped just like that mare."

"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising
the bond that this fact created between them.
"Well, now, I tell you what you do. You let me
come for you 'most any afternoon, now, and take
you out over the Milldam, and speed this mare a
little. I'd like to show you what this mare can do.
Yes, I would."

"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you
know my first day off."

"Good," cried Lapham.

"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.

"No, sir. I don't ride behind anything but
Vermont; never did. Touch of Morgan, of course;
but you can't have Morgan in a horse if you

want speed. Hambletonian mostly. Where'd you
say you wanted to get out?"

"I guess you may put me down at the Events
Office, just round the corner here. I've got to write
up this interview while it's fresh."

"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting
to Bartley's use of him as material.

He had not much to complain of in Bartley's
treatment, unless it was the strain of extravagant
compliment which it involved. But the flattery
was mainly for the paint, whose virtues Lapham did
not believe could be overstated, and himself and
his history had been treated with as much respect
as Bartley was capable of showing any one. He
made a very picturesque thing of the discovery of
the paint-mine. "Deep in the heart of the virgin
forests of Vermont, far up toward the line of the
Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where
an autumnal storm had done its wild work, and the
great trees, strewn hither and thither, bore witness
to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered, just
forty years ago, the mineral which the alchemy of
his son's enterprise and energy has transmuted into
solid ingots of the most precious of metals. The
colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the
bottom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for
him, and which for many years remained a paint-mine
of no more appreciable value than a soap-mine."

Here Bartley had not been able to forego another
grin; but he compensated for it by the high reverence
with which he spoke of Colonel Lapham's

record during the war of the rebellion, and of the
motives which impelled him to turn aside from an
enterprise in which his whole heart was engaged,
and take part in the struggle. "The Colonel bears
embedded in the muscle of his right leg a little memento
of the period in the shape of a minie-ball,
which he jocularly referred to as his thermometer,
and which relieves him from the necessity of reading
`The Probabilities' in his morning paper. This
saves him just so much time; and for a man who,
as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him
anywhere, five minutes a day are something in the
course of a year. Simple, clear, bold, and straightforward
in mind and action, Colonel Silas Lapham,
with a prompt comprehensiveness and a never-failing
business sagacity, is, in the best sense of that much-abused
term, one of nature's noblemen, to the last
inch of his five eleven and a half. His life affords an
example of single-minded application and unwavering
perseverance which our young business men
would do well to emulate. There is nothing showy
or meretricious about the man. He believes in
mineral paint, and he puts his heart and soul into
it. He makes it a religion; though we would not
imply that it is his religion. Colonel Lapham is a
regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy's
church. He subscribes liberally to the Associated
Charities, and no good object or worthy public
enterprise fails to receive his support. He is not
now actively in politics, and his paint is not partisan;
but it is an open secret that he is, and always
has been, a staunch Republican. Without violating
the sanctities of private life, we cannot speak fully
of various details which came out in the free and
unembarrassed interview which Colonel Lapham
accorded our representative. But we may say that
the success of which he is justly proud he is also
proud to attribute in great measure to the sympathy
and energy of his wife—one of those women who,
in whatever walk of life, seem born to honour the
name of American Woman, and to redeem it from
the national reproach of Daisy Millerism. Of Colonel
Lapham's family, we will simply add that it
consists of two young lady daughters.

"The subject of this very inadequate sketch is
building a house on the water side of Beacon Street,
after designs by one of our leading architectural
firms, which, when complete, will be one of the
finest ornaments of that exclusive avenue. It will,
we believe, be ready for the occupancy of the family
sometime in the spring."

When Bartley had finished his article, which he did
with a good deal of inward derision, he went home
to Marcia, still smiling over the thought of Lapham,
whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him.

"He regularly turned himself inside out to me,"
he said, as he sat describing his interview to
Marcia.

"Then I know you could make something nice
out of it," said his wife; "and that will please Mr.
Witherby."

"Oh yes, I've done pretty well; but I couldn't

let myself loose on him the way I wanted to. Con
found the limitations of decency, anyway! I should
like to have told just what Colonel Lapham thought
of landscape advertising in Colonel Lapham's own
words. I'll tell you one thing, Marsh: he had a
girl there at one of the desks that you wouldn't let
me have within gunshot of my office. Pretty? It
ain't any name for it!" Marcia's eyes began to blaze,
and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in which he
arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in
the corner of the room.

"Hello! What's that?"

"Why, I don't know what it is," replied Marcia
tremulously. "A man brought it just before you
came in, and I didn't like to open it."

"Think it was some kind of infernal machine?"
asked Bartley, getting down on his knees to examine
the package. "Mrs. B. Hubbard, heigh?" He cut
the heavy hemp string with his penknife. "We
must look into this thing. I should like to know
who's sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in my
absence." He unfolded the wrappings of paper,
growing softer and finer inward, and presently
pulled out a handsome square glass jar, through
which a crimson mass showed richly. "The Persis
Brand!" he yelled. "I knew it!"

"Oh, what is it, Bartley?" quavered Marcia.
Then, courageously drawing a little nearer: "Is it
some kind of jam?" she implored.

"Jam? No!" roared Bartley. "It's paint! It's
mineral paint—Lapham's paint!"

"Paint?" echoed Marica, as she stood over him
while he stripped their wrappings from the jars
which showed the dark blue, dark green, light
brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark
crimson, forming the gamut of colour of the Lapham
paint. "Don't tell me it's paint that I can use,
Bartley!"

"Well, I shouldn't advise you to use much of it
—all at once," replied her husband. "But it's
paint that you can use in moderation."

Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed
him. "O Bartley, I think I'm the happiest girl in
the world! I was just wondering what I should do.
There are places in that Clover Street house that
need touching up so dreadfully. I shall be very
careful. You needn't be afraid I shall overdo. But,
this just saves my life. Did you buy it, Bartley?
You know we couldn't afford it, and you oughtn't
to have done it! And what does the Persis Brand
mean?"

"Buy it?" cried Bartley. "No! The old fool's
sent it to you as a present. You'd better wait for
the facts before you pitch into me for extravagance,
Marcia. Persis is the name of his wife; and he
named it after her because it's his finest brand.
You'll see it in my interview. Put it on the
market her last birthday for a surprise to her."

"What old fool?" faltered Marcia.

"Why, Lapham—the mineral paint man."

"Oh, what a good man!" sighed Marcia from the
bottom of her soul. "Bartley! you won't make fun

of him as you do of some of those people? Will
you?"

"Nothing that he ll ever find out," said Bartley,
getting up and brushing off the carpet-lint from his
knees.