could take in the parts of a steer with one sweep of my eye. As soon as the job was done we got back to the gig and started to drive to shelter before the storm should break. But it was providentially to be otherwise. We had hardly got the horse unhitched and started on our way, when the storm broke all around us. We tried to press on. Suddenly we were blinded by a blaze of light brighter than a hundred suns at noonday. I guess it was followed by a terrific thunder-clap. But of this I am not sure, because, after that blaze of light, I don't remember anything.

How long I lay unconscious I don't know, but it must have been some time. Because, when I came to, the rain had ceased and the storm had cleared away. I found that my companion had also been stunned and now was likewise coming out of the fit. When we got back some of our senses we looked around. There before us the horse lay, dead in the harness. It was by a miracle that my life had been spared. Then and there I gave myself once more to the Lord. As can be seen, it took a great deal of the grace of God to reach me. He had to try so many times before he finally got me landed safe and sound on his side. I promised that I would never backslide again.

Not that I was ever very bad. Even in my backslideful states I had never been a profane, bad man, and I had always held infidels in great horror. Over

in Greenwich village, across Bloomingdale Road from the "Bull's Head," was the house where a man by the name of Tom Paine had lived. He had written a bad book called "The Age of Reason." To reach his village from my side of the island, I had to go through the potter's field, where public hangings used to be held. The gallows stood right in the middle of what is now Washington Square. On top of that gallows many a poor fellow used to stand, never to walk again "jerked to Jesus" is what we called it back in those days. I don't see how any one, if he had any spark of grace about him, could go by that gallows and across that potter's field to the road where Paine's house was, without feeling a horror for bad men and infidels.

I was glad, after I had fully recovered from the fit into which that stroke of lightning threw me, that I had gone through the experience, and had become at last soundly converted. Because, as it later turned out, the drover business was not to be my work all through life. Just as I was beginning middle life, I left it, said good-bye to my life at the "Bull's Head" tavern, and got into the steamboat business. An owner of steamboats ought to be religious and respectable-like. It may not be so bad for a drover to stay away from church, because his business is a rough-and-ready business, anyhow. People don't expect much of him. But a steamboat proprietor is in a higher seat. A man of promi

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nence is called upon to be godly in his walk and conversation; he should hold his head - like a hen drinking water. There was Peter Cooper. He was godly. He was superintendent of the Sundayschool, there below the "Bull's Head," from which the Bowery Village Church started, He was a man that feared God and went to meeting on Sundays. I was glad that I, too, was now on the Lord's side. And though I have suffered many losses since then, I am thankful to say that from that day to this I have never lost my religion.

M

ΧΙ

Y START into the steamboat business came about more or less haphazard. There was a little boat run between Peekskill and New York, by Jake Vanderbilt, a brother of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was in connection with a boat designed to compete with this one of Vanderbilt's, that I made the start.

This was back in the early days, when steamboating on the Hudson River was just getting under way. The old sailing sloops were still in use, but were rapidly becoming back numbers. A sloop would sometimes take nine days in going from New York to Albany. When the Chancellor Livingston made the trip once in nineteen hours and a half, people thought it a miracle, and gave her the name, Skimmer of the River. But even the sloops were an improvement over the old stagecoach, because the fare by stage-coach from New York to Albany was $8, and it never took less than two days and one night. Besides being slow, the sloops were also inconvenient; yes, even dangersome, because the winds on the Hudson are fluky, squalls rushing out, often without any warning, from

behind the headlands which line both sides of the river. The boom of one of the old packet sloops was sometimes ninety feet long, and when it jibed unlooked-for, would sweep everything before it. There was Dunham, a merchant of New York City and of a considerable name. He was making the trip one day on a sloop down from Albany, when the sail jibed; the boom knocked him overboard like a nine-pin, and he was drowned. So when Fulton, with his partner, Livingston, showed that steam-engines could be put into a boat and would propel it even against wind and tide, it made a great change.

For some years, however, the effect of the new invention was not noticeable. Because Fulton had got a grant from the Legislature giving to him and Livingston exclusive right to steamboat navigation on the tide waters of York State. This kept rival boats off. At last, some time before I started in, this monopoly had been done away. It came about through that famous suit of "Gibbons against Ogden." Thomas Gibbons was the owner of a steamboat, Bellona, which plied between New York and Elizabethtown, New Jersey. (He was the one who built that beautiful estate down at Bottle Hill, New Jersey, which I bought from his son, William Gibbons, and turned into the Drew Theological Seminary, years after.) Ogden had got from Fulton and Livingston a grant to carry on