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The two were forcibly introduced—I mean the boy and the girl—they understood from the first what their destiny was to be. She could find no fault in the society which swam round her and to which such a marriage would introduce her activities; he saw no drawback to the alliance save one or two mannerisms in his prospective father-in-law, which time might modify—or on the other hand, might not.

Ole Man Benson, to give him once more the name by which he was known and hated in another sphere, from the first ten thousand[1] which by the age of forty-three he had laboriously accumulated in shredded codfish, had dealt not with things, as do lesser men, but with figures. He had gone boldly forward like a young Napoleon, using, it must be remembered, not only the money of others but very often his own as well.

He had been born of Scotch-Irish parents, probably of the name of Benson, and certainly married in the First Baptist Church of Cincinnati not quite three-quarters of a century ago. He was the youngest child of a numerous family, and was baptized or named after the poet Theocritus, with a second or middle name of Chepstow, which in his signature he commonly reduced to its initial letter.