The Saturday editors were never tired of describing the strange, impressive personality of Tomlinson, the great dominating character of the newest and highest finance.

From the moment when the interim prospectus of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated had broken like a tidal wave over Stock Exchange circles, the picture of Tomlinson, the sleeping shareholder of uncomputed millions, had filled the imagination of every dreamer in a nation of poets.
They all described him.

And when each had finished he began again.
"The face," so wrote the editor of the "Our Own Men" section of _Ourselves Monthly_, "is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length, ductile but not without its own firmness." "The mouth," so wrote the editor of the "Success" column of _Brains_, "is strong but pliable, the jaw firm and yet movable, while there is something in the set of the ear that suggests the swift, eager mind of the born leader of men." So from state to state ran the portrait of Tomlinson of Tomlinson's Creek, drawn by people who had never seen him; so did it reach out and cross the ocean, till the French journals inserted a picture which they used for such occasions, and called it _Monsieur Tomlinson, nouveau capitaine de la haute finance en Amerique_; and the German weeklies, inserting also a suitable picture from their stock, marked it _Herr Tomlinson, Amerikanischer Industrie und Finanzcapitan_.

Thus did Tomlinson float from Tomlinson's Creek beside Lake Erie to the very banks of the Danube and the Drave.
Some writers grew lyric about him.

What visions, they asked, could one but read them, must lie behind the quiet, dreaming eyes of that inscrutable face?
They might have read them easily enough, had they but had the key.
Anyone who looked upon Tomlinson as he stood there in the roar and clatter of the great rotunda of the Grand Palaver with the telegram in his hand, fumbling at the wrong end to open it, might have read the visions of the master-mind had he but known their nature.