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 can often turn more money into 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

your purse

not be

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 Fiskthey were pupils of mine, both of them. I helped to make them. They were a pair of colts; 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

barn; but that farm was now being cut up into building lots, and criss-crossed by city streets.

The church I attended was on Mulberry Street, not far below my house. And now I set in to go to meeting every Sunday; I was also present on prayer- and class-meeting. nights. I never lost my religion after this. You won't read in these papers of any more backslidings by Dan Drew. It took a good deal of the grace of God to reach me. But when finally he got me landed safe and sound within the fold, he held on to me. I have never slid back from that time to this. Of course, I have had my cold seasons. Every person has those. You can't live on a mountain all the time. Now and then I have found myself in the valley. But I have never failed to get back to the mountain-top experi

ences.

We used to have glorious times in that old Mulberry Street Church. From the Bowery village by Peter Cooper's grocery store, where he was superintendent of the Sunday-school, the church moved first down to the north side of Seventh Street. But the revivals there were so powerful, the neighbours began to object. Some good saint would get the power and would be well-nigh out of his senses. Suddenly he would come to, and with mighty "hallelujahs" would tell of the things he had seen. I don't see why people should object to shouting Christians. I'm not a shouter myself.

But in a love feast I can get good and happy along with the rest. And I like it. If the saints on earth haven't any right to be happy, I should like to know who have. Come, let our joys be known, say I. We are travelling through Immanuel's ground, to fairer worlds on high. Let those refuse to sing who never knew our Lord. The soul that knows its sins forgiven by the atoning Blood applied, and has had vouchsafed unto it the sprinkled conscience and the inward witness, let that man raise his Ebenezer, say I, and shout his joys abroad.

"Show pity, Lord, oh,

Well, as I started to say, some of the neighbours didn't just take to the revivals that used to be held in the old Seventh Street Church; and in those days the preacher would get up a revival every winter. I must confess that some of the meetings did last pretty late into the night. But so much the better. When a sinner has sung: Lord, forgive; let a repenting rebel live!" and sung it over and over until his knees are well-nigh cramped beneath him, and then when he is ready to despair, for seeing himself slipping down the hill into the Devil's lap, if the burden all to once rolls off from him and he gets through and comes out onto the Hallelujah side, that man isn't going to let that meeting come to an end very soon. He is going to relate his experiences. He is going to tell what the Lord has done for him, and keep on telling. And he is going to wrestle with other sinners at