CHAPTER I.
As Mr.Robert Rushbrook, known to an imaginative press as the "Maecenas of the Pacific Slope," drove up to his country seat, equally referred to as a "palatial villa," he cast a quick but practical look at the pillared pretensions of that enormous shell of wood and paint and plaster.

The statement, also a reportorial one, that its site, the Canyon of Los Osos, "some three years ago was disturbed only by the passing tread of bear and wild-cat," had lost some of its freshness as a picturesque apology, and already successive improvements on the original building seemingly cast the older part of the structure back to a hoary antiquity.

To many it stood as a symbol of everything Robert Rushbrook did or had done--an improvement of all previous performances; it was like his own life--an exciting though irritating state of transition to something better.

Yet the visible architectural result, as here shown, was scarcely harmonious; indeed, some of his friends--and Maecenas had many--professed to classify the various improvements by the successive fortunate ventures in their owner's financial career, which had led to new additions, under the names, of "The Comstock Lode Period," "The Union Pacific Renaissance," "The Great Wheat Corner," and "Water Front Gable Style," a humorous trifling that did not, however, prevent a few who were artists from accepting Maecenas's liberal compensation for their services in giving shape to those ideas.
Relinquishing to a groom his fast-trotting team, the second relay in his two hours' drive from San Francisco, he leaped to the ground to meet the architect, already awaiting his orders in the courtyard.

With his eyes still fixed upon the irregular building before him, he mingled his greeting and his directions.
"Look here, Barker, we'll have a wing thrown out here, and a hundred-foot ballroom.