But now they--but let us not dwell upon it.
From candles to apples is but a step: Sally got to taking apples; then soap; then maple-sugar; then canned goods; then crockery.

How easy it is to go from bad to worse, when once we have started upon a downward course! Meantime, other effects had been milestoning the course of the Fosters' splendid financial march.

The fictitious brick dwelling had given place to an imaginary granite one with a checker-board mansard roof; in time this one disappeared and gave place to a still grander home--and so on and so on.

Mansion after mansion, made of air, rose, higher, broader, finer, and each in its turn vanished away; until now in these latter great days, our dreamers were in fancy housed, in a distant region, in a sumptuous vast palace which looked out from a leafy summit upon a noble prospect of vale and river and receding hills steeped in tinted mists--and all private, all the property of the dreamers; a palace swarming with liveried servants, and populous with guests of fame and power, hailing from all the world's capitals, foreign and domestic.
This palace was far, far away toward the rising sun, immeasurably remote, astronomically remote, in Newport, Rhode Island, Holy Land of High Society, ineffable Domain of the American Aristocracy.

As a rule they spent a part of every Sabbath--after morning service--in this sumptuous home, the rest of it they spent in Europe, or in dawdling around in their private yacht.