The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was a
city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more. It was set with
handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories.
Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in
existence—the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer,
city delivery of mails. There were no postage-stamps or registered
letters. The street car had not arrived. In its place were hosts of
omnibuses, and for longer travel the slowly developing railroad system
still largely connected by canals.

Cowperwood’s father was a bank clerk at the time of Frank’s birth, but
ten years later, when the boy was already beginning to turn a very
sensible, vigorous eye on the world, Mr. Henry Worthington Cowperwood,
because of the death of the bank’s president and the consequent moving
ahead of the other officers, fell heir to the place vacated by the
promoted teller, at the, to him, munificent salary of thirty-five
hundred dollars a year. At once he decided, as he told his wife
joyously, to remove his family from 21 Buttonwood Street to 124 New
Market Street, a much better neighborhood, where there was a nice brick
house of three stories in height as opposed to their present
two-storied domicile. There was the probability that some day they
would come into something even better, but for the present this was
sufficient. He was exceedingly grateful.

Henry Worthington Cowperwood was a man who believed only what he saw
and was content to be what he was—a banker, or a prospective one. He
was at this time a significant figure—tall, lean, inquisitorial,
clerkly—with nice, smooth, closely-cropped side whiskers coming to
almost the lower lobes of his ears. His upper lip was smooth and
curiously long, and he had a long, straight nose and a chin that tended
to be pointed. His eyebrows were bushy, emphasizing vague,
grayish-green eyes, and his hair was short and smooth and nicely
parted. He wore a frock-coat always—it was quite the thing in financial
circles in those days—and a high hat. And he kept his hands and nails
immaculately clean. His manner might have been called severe, though
really it was more cultivated than austere.

Being ambitious to get ahead socially and financially, he was very
careful of whom or with whom he talked. He was as much afraid of
expressing a rabid or unpopular political or social opinion as he was
of being seen with an evil character, though he had really no opinion
of great political significance to express. He was neither anti- nor
pro-slavery, though the air was stormy with abolition sentiment and its
opposition. He believed sincerely that vast fortunes were to be made
out of railroads if one only had the capital and that curious thing, a
magnetic personality—the ability to win the confidence of others. He
was sure that Andrew Jackson was all wrong in his opposition to
Nicholas Biddle and the United States Bank, one of the great issues of
the day; and he was worried, as he might well be, by the perfect storm
of wildcat money which was floating about and which was constantly
coming to his bank—discounted, of course, and handed out again to
anxious borrowers at a profit. His bank was the Third National of
Philadelphia, located in that center of all Philadelphia and indeed, at
that time, of practically all national finance—Third Street—and its
owners conducted a brokerage business as a side line. There was a
perfect plague of State banks, great and small, in those days, issuing
notes practically without regulation upon insecure and unknown assets
and failing and suspending with astonishing rapidity; and a knowledge
of all these was an important requirement of Mr. Cowperwood’s position.
As a result, he had become the soul of caution. Unfortunately, for him,
he lacked in a great measure the two things that are necessary for
distinction in any field—magnetism and vision. He was not destined to
be a great financier, though he was marked out to be a moderately
successful one.

Mrs. Cowperwood was of a religious temperament—a small woman, with
light-brown hair and clear, brown eyes, who had been very attractive in
her day, but had become rather prim and matter-of-fact and inclined to
take very seriously the maternal care of her three sons and one
daughter. The former, captained by Frank, the eldest, were a source of
considerable annoyance to her, for they were forever making expeditions
to different parts of the city, getting in with bad boys, probably, and
seeing and hearing things they should neither see nor hear.

Frank Cowperwood, even at ten, was a natural-born leader. At the day
school he attended, and later at the Central High School, he was looked
upon as one whose common sense could unquestionably be trusted in all
cases. He was a sturdy youth, courageous and defiant. From the very
start of his life, he wanted to know about economics and politics. He
cared nothing for books. He was a clean, stalky, shapely boy, with a
bright, clean-cut, incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide
forehead; short, bristly, dark-brown hair. He had an incisive,
quick-motioned, self-sufficient manner, and was forever asking
questions with a keen desire for an intelligent reply. He never had an
ache or pain, ate his food with gusto, and ruled his brothers with a
rod of iron. “Come on, Joe!” “Hurry, Ed!” These commands were issued in
no rough but always a sure way, and Joe and Ed came. They looked up to
Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened
to eagerly.

He was forever pondering, pondering—one fact astonishing him quite as
much as another—for he could not figure out how this thing he had come
into—this life—was organized. How did all these people get into the
world? What were they doing here? Who started things, anyhow? His
mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it.
There was a fish-market not so very far from his home, and there, on
his way to see his father at the bank, or conducting his brothers on
after-school expeditions, he liked to look at a certain tank in front
of one store where were kept odd specimens of sea-life brought in by
the Delaware Bay fishermen. He saw once there a sea-horse—just a queer
little sea-animal that looked somewhat like a horse—and another time he
saw an electric eel which Benjamin Franklin’s discovery had explained.
One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in the tank, and in connection
with them was witness to a tragedy which stayed with him all his life
and cleared things up considerably intellectually. The lobster, it
appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as
the squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the
clear glass tank on the yellow sand, apparently seeing nothing—you
could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of eyes were
looking—but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. The
latter, pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or
jade, moved about in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently
never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of
his body began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his
pursuer. The lobster would leap like a catapult to where the squid was
apparently idly dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away,
shooting out at the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would
disappear. It was not always completely successful, however. Small
portions of its body or its tail were frequently left in the claws of
the monster below. Fascinated by the drama, young Cowperwood came daily
to watch.

One morning he stood in front of the tank, his nose almost pressed to
the glass. Only a portion of the squid remained, and his ink-bag was
emptier than ever. In the corner of the tank sat the lobster, poised
apparently for action.

The boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter struggle fascinating
him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or a day, the squid might die, slain by
the lobster, and the lobster would eat him. He looked again at the
greenish-copperish engine of destruction in the corner and wondered
when this would be. To-night, maybe. He would come back to-night.

He returned that night, and lo! the expected had happened. There was a
little crowd around the tank. The lobster was in the corner. Before him
was the squid cut in two and partially devoured.

“He got him at last,” observed one bystander. “I was standing right
here an hour ago, and up he leaped and grabbed him. The squid was too
tired. He wasn’t quick enough. He did back up, but that lobster he
calculated on his doing that. He’s been figuring on his movements for a
long time now. He got him to-day.”

Frank only stared. Too bad he had missed this. The least touch of
sorrow for the squid came to him as he stared at it slain. Then he
gazed at the victor.

“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That
squid wasn’t quick enough.” He figured it out.

“The squid couldn’t kill the lobster—he had no weapon. The lobster
could kill the squid—he was heavily armed. There was nothing for the
squid to feed on; the lobster had the squid as prey. What was the
result to be? What else could it be? He didn’t have a chance,” he
concluded finally, as he trotted on homeward.

The incident made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way
that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: “How is
life organized?” Things lived on each other—that was it. Lobsters lived
on squids and other things. What lived on lobsters? Men, of course!
Sure, that was it! And what lived on men? he asked himself. Was it
other men? Wild animals lived on men. And there were Indians and
cannibals. And some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t
so sure about men living on men; but men did kill each other. How about
wars and street fights and mobs? He had seen a mob once. It attacked
the Public Ledger building as he was coming home from school. His
father had explained why. It was about the slaves. That was it! Sure,
men lived on men. Look at the slaves. They were men. That’s what all
this excitement was about these days. Men killing other men—negroes.

He went on home quite pleased with himself at his solution.

“Mother!” he exclaimed, as he entered the house, “he finally got him!”

“Got who? What got what?” she inquired in amazement. “Go wash your
hands.”

“Why, that lobster got that squid I was telling you and pa about the
other day.”

“Well, that’s too bad. What makes you take any interest in such things?
Run, wash your hands.”

“Well, you don’t often see anything like that. I never did.” He went
out in the back yard, where there was a hydrant and a post with a
little table on it, and on that a shining tin-pan and a bucket of
water. Here he washed his face and hands.

“Say, papa,” he said to his father, later, “you know that squid?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’s dead. The lobster got him.”

His father continued reading. “Well, that’s too bad,” he said,
indifferently.

But for days and weeks Frank thought of this and of the life he was
tossed into, for he was already pondering on what he should be in this
world, and how he should get along. From seeing his father count money,
he was sure that he would like banking; and Third Street, where his
father’s office was, seemed to him the cleanest, most fascinating
street in the world.