the globe and operated as well the busy ferryboats upon the tidal stream; there were also the interurban trolley line and other minor tributaries and feeders to the larger corporations. There was finally the huge parent corporation called Boland General.
And last of all, dominating all, creating and energizing all, was John Boland himself, a man in the later fifties with a brow like Napoleon and recessed peering eyes, whose boast it was that where one of his corporations went in, two blades of grass began at once to grow where one had grown before. He boasted this so many times that his intimates began to speak of him humorously at first and afterwards affectionately, as "Old Two Blades."
And the people of the three towns, Edgewater, Socatullo and Wahpeetah—his towns that he had created—were proud of him also. Was he not their patron saint? Was he not first in every good work in the community—the public libraries, the hospitals, the community centers, with gymnasium and playground and athletic field attachments, all to keep the people, young and old, amused and entertained and contented and out of mischief—were they not all in a large sense monuments to his generosity and foresight? They were.
Why, not even a butcher's boy in any of the three towns could display talent in business but the Boland corporations sought him out, attached him to their enterprises and hung glittering baits before him—gave him a chance, an incentive to rise. And they were hanging glittering baits before Henry Harrington this morning. Some argus eye of Boland General had noted Henry and coveted him.
