But after a while the letters ceased to come.
When Elphinstone was sold, the purchaser was a certain Mr.Aaron Wickersham of New York, the father of Ferdy Wickersham, with whom Gordon had had the rock-battle.

Mr.Wickersham was a stout and good-humored man of fifty, with a head like a billiard-bail, and a face that was both shrewd and kindly.

He had, during the war, made a fortune out of contracts, and was now preparing to increase it in the South, where the mountain region, filled with coal and iron, lay virgin for the first comer with sufficient courage and astuteness to take it.

He found the new legislature of the State an instrument well fitted to his hands.

It could be manipulated.
The Wickershams had lately moved into a large new house on Fifth Avenue, where Fashion was climbing the hill toward the Park in the effort to get above Murray Hill, and possibly to look down upon the substantial and somewhat prosaic mansions below, whose doors it had sometimes been found difficult to enter.