When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town always ruin somebody.
Mr.Vertrees had been most strikingly the somebody in this case.

At about the time he bought the Landseers, he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce, all the year round.

If he had known how to sit still and let things happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough, the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of Juggernaut for his better education.

He was a true prophet of the prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying bad.

He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained milkers milked her dry and then ate her.