By now his mind was upon this one great fact⁠—May Wheat⁠—continually. It was with him the instant he woke in the morning. It kept him company during his hasty breakfast; in the rhythm of his horses’ hoofs, as the team carried him down town he heard, “ Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat. ” No sooner did he enter La Salle Street, than the roar of traffic came to his ears as the roar of the torrent of wheat which drove through Chicago from the Western farms to the mills and bakeshops of Europe. There at the foot of the street the torrent swirled once upon itself, forty million strong, in the eddy which he told himself he mastered. The afternoon waned, night came on. The day’s business was to be gone over; the morrow’s campaign was to be planned; little, unexpected side issues, a score of them, a hundred of them, cropped out from hour to hour; new decisions had to be taken each minute. At dinner time he left the office, and his horses carried him home again, while again their hoofs upon the asphalt beat out unceasingly the monotone of the one refrain, “ Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat.