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not be allowed to come in and take my thoughts away from business.

But I did now and then take time off to see the sights. For instance, there was the big celebration when Henry Clay visited the city. He came up to be present when the body of President John Quincy Adams was brought on to New York from Washington. I had always regarded Clay as a great man. He had been the one to import Devons, Herefords and a lot of fine short-horns from England, and was helping to introduce these breeds into the Kentucky and Ohio lands. New England's favourite was the Devon. There was also the long-horn Texas cattle, which was being boasted about by the Westerners. But I never took much to those long-horns. They are but one remove above the buffalo, and are ungainly critters. The polled Durham of Ohio is far better for ordinary purposes, being quiet at the feeding rack and troughs. I kind of took to Henry Clay because he was so hot to get the farmers out in his section of the country to take up with high-grade breeds of cattle. On his farm in Kentucky they used to say that he had as fine a fat stock array as a man could ask to see. Those Western soils, anyhow, helped a whole lot in improving the breeds of live stock. There was the red hog of New Jersey, which formed the foundation for the large and heavy animals exported to the West Indies; when sent West it took on plumpness and became

that fine-grained meat which corn-growing countries always give to a healthy breed. The same thing happened with the white hog of Pennsylvania. Before he was sent to Northern Ohio, he was a tough and lanky animal; but out there he became fine and plump. Out West also they got to crossing the Berkshire and China breeds upon the common heg, and made something finer than had ever been seen before. Those Western States were great in improving the quality of butcher's meat. Henry Clay would, to my thinking, have made an A No. I President if he had ever been elected.

But after a while we didn't have so much time over at our banking house of "Drew, Robinson & Co." for discussing breeds of cattle. We had our hands full in handling the business that began to come in. When you are loaning money, buying and selling railroad and steamboat shares, and such Tike, it keeps you going. If you don't look out, one slip will make an almighty loss. In fact our house made a slip at the start. One of our customers was a fellow we had known for some time. He owed us $30.000. My partners were for extending the loan. I was against it. They begged talked about old friendship's sake, and such Eke. They got me to consent. Resul we lost the money. That taught me a lesson. Sentiment is al right up in the part of the city where your home is. But downtown, No. Down there the dog that

snaps the quickest gets the bone. Friendship is very nice for a Sunday afternoon when you're sitting around the dinner table with your relations, talking about the sermon that morning. But nine o'clock Monday morning, notions should be brushed away like cobwebs from a machine. I never took any stock in a man who mixed up business with anything else. He can go into other things outside of business hours. But when he's in his office, he ought not to have a relation in the world — and least of all a poor relation.

I also saw from this incident that I was not a good hand for working along with other people, being better fitted to go it alone, so to speak. I saw, or perhaps kind of felt, that there was going to be lots of money in the stock-market business. So I began to turn my efforts more and more in that direction. And if my partners wouldn't go with me into speckilation, I could go without them. When you are doing just a banking business and nothing else, your returns may be safe, but they're almighty slow. The same with running a steamboat, or a railroad. But if you can buy up the shares of a company and sell them again inside of a year or two, you c can often turn more money into your purse in a twelve-month than you can make by slow business profits in twelve years. For instance, there was the Lake Champlain Line of steamboats, which we controlled. We might have just settled down, and in a poky way run those boats and made our

profits, slow and sure. But I was in for bigger things. So we sold that line to the Saratoga and Whitehall railroad, and I put the money in the form of cash for speckilating. My experiences had told me that I had skill in getting deals worked through, and that these would bring quicker gains than the slow-poke method of regular business. So I went into operations in the stock market.

People have coupled my name along with Fisk and Gould. But it will be seen from what is here being set down that I was in advance of both of them. Here I was, an operator in Wall Street, when the Stock Exchange was new. I was a middleaged man on the Street when Jim Fisk was a baby in the cradle, and before Jay Gould had seen the light of day. I might almost say I was their Wall Street parent. Many of their schemes and methods they learned from me. I was the pioneer. The way to manipulate stocks and work Wall Street dickers was well-nigh unknown when I first went into the business. I thought up many of the schemes out of my own brain. Those who came after had nothing to do but copy my ideas. Gould and Fisk they were pupils of mine, both of them. I helped to make them. They were a pair of cols; I broke them in. It is easy now to lay out a campaign for working the market. But back in my early days, it wasn't so easy by a long shot. I had to invent ways of doing it. I had no guides to steer by.

I

XIV

WAS getting now to be a power in the financial market. Accordingly I wanted to live

right in the city, and no longer out in the suburbs. I got a house on Bleecker Street, just where Mulberry Street runs into it - No. 52 Bleecker, it was the upper corner towards the Bowery. That section had formerly been the blackberry region for Manhattan Island. When I was at the "Bull's Head," Bleecker Street was a lane lined with blackberry bushes, and in the berry season was a great place for picnics from far and near. It was also a good region for snipe shooting, and also for hunting rabbits. But by now you would hardly have recognized the place. For the city had grown up into it. The digging out of the stream just below into a canal (where Canal Street now runs) had helped to drain the frog-meadows up in the Bleecker Street section of the island. The Broad Way was pushed up to Union Square (as it was by and by called), and tacked onto the Bloomingdale Road which continued it up to the middle of the island kitty-corner. Where Grace Church now stands, there used to be an old high-peaked