there is a clause permitting him to extend his tracks down Broadway, whenever the Mayor and Aldermen of New York City give their consent.

Tweed began to prick up his ears. He was a quick fellow to arrive at your meaning. He had a shrewd headpiece. It's true that women could lead him around by the nose. (The same with Richard Connolley - "Slippery Dick," we used to call him. That That woman of his whom he picked up from the Turkish Bath where she had been an attendant, used to play him all kinds of tricks, and he wasn't any the wiser. If it had been a man, Dick would have seen through him at once.) But in other ways Tweed was very knowing. He now listened close.

I then went on to show how we could work the nat Common Council in such a way as to squeeze Vander

bilt in his Harlem-Broadway enterprise, and make a neat little sum out of it.

We became friends again, whereas it had looked pretty squally half an hour before. Tweed was a gunpowder fellow. He got mad quick and got over it quick. Now that I had promised to help him get back by this Harlem-Railroad deal some of the money he had lost, he was willing to be on good terms again with me.

T

XIX

HE Harlem Railroad was the offspring
of the stage-coach that used to run by
my "Bull's Head" tavern.
That stage

line was from Park Row, New York City, up to Harlem Village, above where 110th Street now is. As the people moved out from New York and settled up in that section, Harlem grew to be a good-sized town. When railroads were at last seen to be practicable things, a line of rails was laid from that village down to New York, and was called the Harlem Railroad because it went to Harlem Village. The rails were not laid along the Old Boston Road. It would have scared the horses. Anyhow, the stage-coach people didn't like the new-fangled steam buggies any too much, and never would have allowed their post-roads to be encroached upon in that fashion. So the rails were laid a little to the west of the Boston Road, where Fourth Avenue

now runs.

The Harlem railroad first along wasn't much thought of. Its stock just before the War sold as low as eight dollars a share. But, instead of allowing it to stop with Harlem Village, they now began

to run it up through the Harlem Valley, where I used to drive my critters down from Putnam County to the city. By and by it got clean up to Brewsters'. Vanderbilt about this time had a lot of loose money, and began to invest in the stock of this railroad. His friends laughed at him. They thought the shares were hardly worth the paper they were printed on said the road would go up the spout soon or late. But he kept at it, and by and by owned a big block of stock. I got in, too, and soon owned considerable of it.

The depot was down on Fourth Avenue at Twentysixth Street. The trains didn't run all the way down there. It was thought that engines were not fitted for climbing hills. So four horses used to take each car out from the station and draw it through the streets up to Forty-third Street. There the cars were made up into a train and hitched onto an engine which took them flying out to Brewsters'. By and by Vanderbilt got rid of that bothersome Murray Hill which stood square in the middle of his car line, by digging a tunnel right through the bowels of it.

This tunnel made the Commodore very proud of himself. A good many people had said, when he had begun the tunnel, that it was too big a job that he couldn't go through with it. But he had done it had widened Fourth Avenue forty feet in order to make room and now was so vain

glorious that he planned a still bigger scheme. He would take that street-railway end of his Harlem Railroad and continue it down from Twenty-sixth Street to Fourteenth, there turn the corner over into Broadway, and then run it all the way to the Battery. By this time Broadway had become a much-travelled thoroughfare. A street-car line through it would be a money-maker. Here is where, by means of taking the Common Council into our partnership, Tweed and I got in our scheme.

I set to work. I bought some more of the Harlem stock. (The price had got away beyond that eight-dollar figure.) Then, when I and the rest of us who were on the deal had got pretty well loaded up with Harlem, we got the Common Council to pass an ordinance permitting Vanderbilt to go ahead and lay his rails down Broadway. The Mayor signed it. Instantly, the stock went soaring. The Legislature up at Albany were mad as hornets. They saw all the good fat pickings going to the Aldermen and Councilmen of New York City, rather than to themselves. But they couldn't do anything; because there was the clause in Vanderbilt's old Harlem Charter, permitting such a thing to be done whenever the New York City authorities gave their consent. The "Chancellorsville Rise" came along just at this moment and also helped. Hooker, with what he called "the finest army on the planet," had for months been watching

the rebels. At last he had crossed the Rappa-
hannock and advanced against the enemy. We in
Wall Street began to hold our breath for fear lest
he'd end the war then and there, and our period
of prosperity come to an end. But he retreated
and now was on this side the Rappahannock once
more. It was a great relief. Stocks rose all along
the line. For we saw now that
spell of war-time speckilation.
along with the other stocks.

we'd have a longer
Harlem went up

With Harlem's stock up at a high figure, and continually soaring higher, I saw what seemed the favourable moment to make our move. So we began to sell the stock short. In order to start a Bear campaign, you must first balloon the stock sky-high. Because when you are a Bear you sell when the stock is high, and deliver when the stock is low (that is, if the deal turns out right). Your profit is the difference between those two figures the greater the difference, the greater your profit. Besides, it is usually easier to put out a line of shorts when the market is high. Through some kink or other in human nature, the ordinary run of people are bullish and hopeful towards a stock when it's high. The stock has gone up so finely, they suppose it's going to keep on going up, and you usually find them ready buyers of your short sales.

This was true in the present case. The stock never looked to have better prospects than it did