to look for work. From one place after another he is coldly turned away. Still he persists. At last, almost at evening, he enters a dry-goods store. The proprietor needs an errand boy. He engages young Thomas, whose looks please him, to go to work the next morning at seven o'clock. Young Thomas takes off his cap and hangs it on a peg. He says:

"If you please, sir, I would rather go to work now," and seizing a broom begins to sweep out.

Does it not sound like a page from the old Fourth Reader?

"What are you doing there, little boy?" asked the good banker, looking over the counter.

"Picking up pins, sir," said Henry. And on the last page he is taken into partnership and marries the banker's daughter.

Do not smile. It is all sober earnest and part of the record of a sober, earnest life. The errand boy labors early and late at $3 a week. Presently he becomes a salesman. Then he is taken into partnership. Eventually he marries the proprietor's daughter. It is the very apotheosis of commercial romance.

Meantime, he had been looking far beyond Baltimore and the dry-goods business. From the be

ginning he had made up his mind to be, if possible, the richest man of his times. Upon that determination the wide, square, bulldog jaws came down like a clamp. It was the time of Jay Gould and Erie, of Jim Fisk and the first Vanderbilt. The road to fortune was a turnpike to Wall Street. His employer was interested in some banking and brokerage firm in New York; the young man secured a transfer of his activities from Baltimore to the golden city of his dreams. There we find him in a humble place as clerk or capper or runner or croupier for some respectable house in the Street, and his energy, tireless industry, and profound interest in his work soon win him advancement. No firm can afford to overlook the worth of a youth that does nothing but study and strive in his busiAfter a time he feels able to make a start for himself. He becomes a partner in a firm: Lee, Ryan & Warren. Then he marries. Soon afterward he buys a seat on the Stock Exchange.

ness.

Then came times bad for gambling-1874. Black Friday, the Jay Cooke smash and the collapse of so many fair firms were only a few months behind, and before was a long, dreary season of prostrate business, silent mills, and unemployed

hosts.

Depreciated paper currency and inflated

credit had done their worst.

Under such condi

tions, the public, having bitter memories and no money to lose, will have none of Wall Street, and the youthful capper finds but barren pickings. Yet young Mr. Ryan, faring in a small, careful way through those lean years, did well enough. He saw his little operations slowly grow and the tilth thereof was the accumulations that were the joy of life to him. Certain qualities commended him to men that sat in the high places about the Wall Street game. He was intelligent, he understood the market, he moved quickly-and he was silent, always; a grave, self-contained, taciturn young man. That was a great matter; anything once committed to his keeping oxen and wain ropes could not drag beyond those iron jaws. Gentlemen having delicate negotiations in finance found that Mr. Ryan was a good man to operate through. He knew his business and he could be trusted implicitly. He began to win attention—and commissions; and after a time he undertook some little things on his own account that resulted well, both in profits and reputation. He used to search out the properties that were so bad that they must needs be remade or perish, and to float with the upward wave when the remaking began. He won no great sums, but was

steadily getting closer to the leaders that controlled millions and obtaining their approval as a young man of the right sort.

He

One of these leaders was of a mind and character unusual; the rest fade away into the dull mists of commonplace. In a time that has for its distinguishing trait the union of rotten business with rotten politics, William C. Whitney was a conspicuously able financial exploiter and a conspicuously able political manipulator. I suppose that without doubt he had the best mind that ever engaged in Wall Street affairs, and without doubt he was equipped for better things than he achieved. had a big doming head, not very broad but long and high, strange blue-gray eyes, very cold, very steady, and utterly fearless; a masterful and confident disposition; and a knowledge of men, and I think contempt for them, beyond any other man I have known. He was at will the most fascinating and polished man of the world, or the most overbearing and intolerable bully. His associates always seemed to fear as much as they admired him; there are records of directors' meetings absolutely terrorized by his indomitable will. In his way he had extraordinary mental capacity; his mind was an unresting

engine, his ambition was inordinate, and but for some providential tempering by spendthrift and luxurious habits would have made him monstrously rich. I need not pretend that he had any overnice scruples about methods. He could see a little farther than the grubbing moles about him, and discerning an object he moved relentlessly toward it, sometimes trampling heads and sometimes mire, and regarding neither.

Therein lay for him the talisman of ability, the badge that distinguished him from the 500,000, from the 1,500,000, and from the 2,000,000. The divine gift had this substance and none other. Mr. Whitney dwelt his days among the palaces; he was born to a sense of superiority; he married wealth; the burden of life was easy upon him. No one may say that the goad of poverty drove him to climb from among the 2,000,000 or the 1,500,000. But he was a conspicuous example of those that having means used wealth to get more wealth for which they had no need.

So many long-forgotten chapters of history hang about these records! The old New York Cable Railroad, for instance-how many years have passed since we have heard a mention of that once menacing specter, or of Charles P. Shaw, the eccen