He seemed to think himself, at last,
released from any such limitations. He moved a quite considerable hill,
and nearly sixty mature trees were moved with it to open his prospect
eastward, moved it about two hundred feet to the south. At another
time he caught a suggestion from some city restaurant and made a
billiard-room roofed with plate glass beneath the waters of his
ornamental lake. He furnished one wing while its roof still awaited
completion. He had a swimming bath thirty feet square next to his
bedroom upstairs, and to crown it all he commenced a great wall to hold
all his dominions together, free from the invasion of common men. It
was a ten-foot wall, glass surmounted, and had it been completed as he
intended it, it would have had a total length of nearly eleven miles.
Some of it towards the last was so dishonestly built that it collapsed
within a year upon its foundations, but some miles of it still stand. I
never think of it now but what I think of the hundreds of eager little
investors who followed his "star," whose hopes and lives, whose wives'
security and children's prospects are all mixed up beyond redemption
with that flaking mortar.
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