burdocks. We have an idea that if the Colonel keeps on attending to the business of personal decoration, the burdocks will get a good start out at New Rome."
This, however, was almost the only carping note in the grand chorus of reviews that teemed from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Colonel Halket hoarded them in a scrap-book and dwelt upon them with admiration. He treasured likewise editorial discussions based on his volume and even newspaper clippings that quoted passages from it. The titles of these gave him pleasure, for he figured in them very often,—"A Golden Rule Manufacturer," "A Pioneer of Industry," "The Best Type of Capitalist," "The Portrait of a True American." A man of seventy-eight might spend his last days less pleasantly than in brooding over such definitions of himself.
With the popular success of his book, he felt that he had achieved that which he had coveted,—a national reputation for himself, not merely for his steel. It was a fitting achievement to crown his life; he had taken rank now and was recognized as one of the influential men of the country, a power in the industrial world, a leader in action and in thought. "Perhaps no man of this generation," said the Avalon Sunday Times, "has been more actively identified with the country's development than Colonel Robert Halket of this city." Perhaps not, thought Colonel Halket.
Having bemused himself with these pleasant notions, he was quite entertained to learn that his utterances had shocked some of his brother manufacturers severely. It was the privilege of the first citizen of Avalon, a leading citizen of the United States, to shock smaller men; it was in fact a duty; and as for their murmuring criticism and dissent, it was truly ludicrous. Who among them had achieved one tenth of his success? He was giving his immediate neighbors—more than them, the whole country—a demonstration of the fact that a gigantic industrial concern can be run with absolutely no friction,
