Chapter 4

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The bishop thought the capful of wind was an Atlantic storm, and worried the captain by asking constantly if there was danger. The captain led his lordship to the hatch over the fo'cs'le. "You hear the crew swearing," he said. "Do you think those men would use such oaths if there was danger of their meeting death?" The sun set in an angry storm-torn sky, the wind rose higher yet, and the good steamer pitched and rolled and groaned and creaked. It was midnight, and a portly figure crept forward to the fo'cs'le hatch. "Thank heaven," murmured the bishop, "those men are swearing yet."--_New York Mercury._

How They Got On In The World.

Brief Biographies of Successful Men Who Have Passed Through the Crucible of Small Beginnings and Won Out.

_Compiled and edited for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.

A TITLED INVENTOR.

Englishman Spent Fortune After Fortune Experimenting With New Ideas, but Died a Millionaire.

Samuel Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Masham, whose air-brake is used on many British railroads and who invented the first successful wool-combing machine, started, in 1837, at Manningham, Yorkshire, England, in company with his elder brother, a small worsted-spinning establishment. Both brothers had worked at the trade since childhood, and both were capable men. For a time the business prospered. Then it began to drop off and the elder partner accused Samuel of wasting his time and energy in experimenting with toys when he should devote his efforts exclusively to building up the enterprise they had started. The discussion almost terminated in a rupture between the two, but a couple of the toys were patented and as machines in the worsted-spinning business they brought in a fair profit.

But another cause for dissension arose. As fast as money came in for early inventions it was spent in experimenting on other things. Several times Cunliffe-Lister spent what would then be looked upon as a fairly comfortable fortune in trying to perfect his ideas, and, despite his income, he continually hovered on the verge of bankruptcy.

Perfects His Wool-Comber.

At last, in 1865, he perfected the wool-comber, a machine that takes the raw material, thoroughly cleanses it, and straightens the fiber, leaving it ready for the carder to take in hand. Its enormous utility was instantly recognized, and the wool-working towns and cities of England and the United States were supplied with the new machines. During the subsequent years the inventor received every year, from this machine alone, an income that seldom fell below two hundred thousand pounds.

The first form of the wool-comber was far more perfect than the first form of most machines. Nevertheless, Cunliffe-Lister spent enormous sums of money in making improvements on it, and on one occasion, when several hundred of the machines were ready for shipment, he held them up in order that there might be incorporated in them certain improvements he had just made. His partners protested that the machines embodied all the features the purchasers had paid for. The inventor was obdurate, and every one of the machines had added to it the improvements, and all the alterations were made solely at his expense.

Head Not Turned by Fortune.

The immense fortune he had made from this and other inventions never for an instant turned him from his work and experiments. Like Edison, he had the ability to concentrate his mind for long periods, to work for long stretches with little rest, and to apportion to his assistants the experiments that he could not personally perform. He could have retired thirty-five years ago and been assured of a large income for the remainder of his life, but he preferred to stick to his work to the last.

"You've got your fortune now," said one of his friends; "why don't you stop working?"

"I didn't work simply to acquire wealth," he replied. "I value the money chiefly for what it will enable me to do."

His second great invention was the air-brake, introduced by him at about the same time Westinghouse introduced his air-brake in America. The English inventor, however, experienced little difficulty in having his device adopted, for he had already made a name for himself, and the English railroad officials were willing to give the benefit of thorough, practical tests to what he brought them. The tests proved the efficiency of the brake, and its general adoption added greatly to the inventor's already large income.

He worked incessantly, experimenting in all branches of science, and his improvements in mill machinery, in railroad devices and steel working are of immense value. For weeks at a time, the expense of his experiments averaged a thousand pounds a day. In spite of this, the enormous income he received from his patents more than kept pace with his expenses, and when he died, early last February, he was one of the richest men in the United Kingdom.

HARD-FIGHTING EDITOR.

Founder of Modern Journalism Was Called Everything That Had an Unpleasant Name, but He Prospered.

James Gordon Bennett, who founded the _New York Herald_, was well over thirty-five years of age when he left the office of the old _New York Courier and Enquirer_. He had learned what a newspaper should be, he believed, and he was going to put that knowledge into operation. He had toiled early and late all his life, and when he was ready to start for himself he had a nominal capital of five hundred dollars, and a big idea.

He was the only newspaper man in New York who thought that a newspaper didn't have to be dull to be good. In fact, he found that if he wished to be an editor at all it would have to be on his own paper. So on May 6, 1835, in a cellar on Wall Street, he issued the first number of the _Herald_.

Many things which we take for granted in the newspapers of to-day were originated by Bennett and his lively little cellar-born sheet. In the second month of its existence, the _Herald_ printed the first Wall Street reports that had ever appeared in an American daily. Later, in the same year, Bennett introduced modern reportorial methods by his graphic "story" of the great fire that devastated down-town New York in December, 1835; and his introduction of a picture of the Stock Exchange on fire, and a map of the burned district, was another epoch-making innovation. It was he, too, who ordered for the _Herald_ a telegraphic report of the first speech ever sent in full over the wires to a newspaper--that of Calhoun on the Mexican War.

There were no theories concerning the news in the _Herald_, no stately, long-winded, word-spinning explanations of what the news meant; just the news itself, given tersely and in as simple and bright language as possible. The readers were left to draw their own inferences and make their own comments.

Competitors Tried to Crush Him.

Bennett was right in trusting to the readers' intelligence, for his following increased. But though the public came to him in goodly numbers, the battle was a desperate, up-hill one. Five years after he started, all the papers in the city banded together to crush him. The records of the fight are curious now, chiefly for the profusion of the epithets that were hurled at him. One paper, in one short broadside, managed to call him an "obscene rogue," "profligate adventurer," "venomous reptile," "pestilential scoundrel," "polluted wretch," "habitual liar," and "veteran blackguard."

Bennett weathered the storm, seldom bothering about hitting back, but all the time striving to make his paper brighter and more readable. His adversaries soon realized that they were losing ground, and they gradually relinquished the struggle.

Twelve years after he had started the _Herald_, Bennett got into a dispute with Horace Greeley concerning the relative circulation of the _Herald_ and _Tribune_. The dispute was settled by an impartial committee, and this committee found that the _Herald_ had a daily circulation of 16,711 to the _Tribune's_ 11,455, while the _Weekly Herald_ had a circulation of 11,455 to a circulation of 15,780 for the _Weekly Tribune_. On the whole, the result was a decided victory for Bennett.

His Announcement of His Marriage.

Here is the announcement of his marriage, written by himself and published in the _Herald_ on June 1, 1840:

To the Readers of the "Herald"--Declaration of Love--Caught at Last--Going to Be Married--New Movement in Civilization.

I am going to be married in a few days. The weather is so beautiful--times are getting so good--the prospects of political and moral reforms so auspicious, that I cannot resist the divine instincts of honest nature any longer; so I am going to be married to one of the most splendid women in intellect, in heart, in soul, in property, in person, in manner, that I have yet seen in the course of my interesting pilgrimage through human life.

I cannot stop in my career. I must fulfil that awful destiny which the Almighty Father has written against my name, in the broad letters of life, against the wall of Heaven. I must give the world a pattern of happy wedded life, with all the charities that spring from a nuptial love.

In a few days I shall be married according to the holy rites of the most holy Catholic Church, to one of the most remarkable, accomplished, and beautiful young women of the age. She possesses a fortune. I sought and found a fortune--a very large fortune.

She has no Stonington shares, or Manhattan stock, but in purity and uprightness she is worth half a million of pure coin. Can any swindling bank show as much? In good sense and elegance, another half a million; in soul, mind, and beauty, millions on millions, equal to the whole specie of all the rotten banks in the whole world.

Happily, the patronage of the public to the _Herald_ is nearly twenty-five thousand dollars per annum--almost equal to a President's salary. But property in the world's goods was never my object, Fame, public good, usefulness in my day and generation--the religious associates of female excellence--the progress of true industry--these have been my dreams by night and my desires by day.

In the new and holy condition into which I am about to enter, and to enter with the same reverential feelings as I would Heaven itself. I anticipate some signal changes in my feelings, in my views, in my purposes, in my pursuits. What they may be I know not; time alone can tell. My ardent desire has been through life to reach the highest order of human excellence by the shortest possible cut. Associated night and day, in sickness and in health, in war and in peace, with a woman of this highest order of excellence, must produce some curious results in my heart and feelings, and these results the future will develop in due time in the columns of the _Herald_.

Meantime I return my heartfelt thanks for the enthusiastic patronage of the public, both in Europe and in America. The holy estate of wedlock will only increase my desire to be still more useful. God Almighty bless you all.

JAMES GORDON BENNETT.

A BARBER LINGUIST.

King of Italy's Prize for Language Scholarship Won by Humble Toiler Who Amazes Europe.

Alfredo Trombetti, who won the King of Italy's Prize for Languages, has a remarkable history. In 1903 King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, carrying out his plan for encouraging education, offered a prize of ten thousand _lire_--two thousand dollars--for the best contribution to the study of languages. Hundreds of Italian scholars competed. But the work of the judges was facilitated by the fact that one man so far distanced the others that there could be absolute unanimity in making the award. The successful treatise was in five volumes, and was a remarkable study and comparison of ancient languages, into which the author had compressed a store of knowledge that astounded the learned judges.

The writer was Trombetti. Those who passed on his work had never before heard of him. They looked him up, and their astonishment at his erudition was heightened when they found he was a poor teacher in a little academy at Cuneo, a town with a population of thirty thousand. He, in turn, was astonished that the reward should come to him, for he was as modest as he was poor. His salary was less than two hundred and fifty dollars a year, and on this he supported a family of seven. The prize amounted to two thousand dollars--a sum greater than he could earn in eight years of teaching. He was master of fifty languages and dialects.

Learned from Customers.

They found he was a simple, enthusiastic man, without much knowledge of the world and of its ways. He had been living among books practically all his life, and they represented everything to him, and for them he had sacrificed practically everything. But underneath the naïveté there were the solidity and thoroughness of the scholar. Trombetti had cultivated his natural aptitude for languages by the most exhaustive studies and at a cost few men would care to meet. After the dull routine and hard work of the school year he employed his vacations in traveling about from one library to another in order to consult and study the books he could not afford to buy. On these trips black bread, wayside pot-herbs, and fruit given him from vineyards and orchards formed his fare.

He managed to buy some books, painfully saving the money cent by cent, and when other scholars discovered him he had already gathered together a fairly good library. In that library the chief place was occupied by a tattered old French grammar, a book he had bought for five cents when a boy, and from which he had learned his first foreign language.

"How did you manage to acquire such an amount of knowledge?" one of the judges asked him.

"I began when I was a barber," he said.

"A barber!"

"Yes. When a man sat in my chair I let him talk. I got from one a new word, from another a new variation in dialect. So even there I was learning all the time."

Faculty Not Easily Acquired.

The faculty of learning languages, he said, was not easily acquired. It took him longer to gain a reading knowledge of French, despite the fact that French and Italian have an enormous number of words derived from the same common source, than it took him to learn Russian and Hebrew--the fifth and sixth languages he began to study--although both the latter are much more difficult than French.

"I had taught myself how to study," he said, "how to systematize, and make everything I had previously learned help me in everything I undertook. I know from my own case that any one can learn a language if he is determined and will give a little time each day to it."

So, by pursuing the method he had learned, Trombetti had placed himself, as far as the number of languages understood is concerned, with Cardinal Mezzofanti, who spoke fifty-eight.

The winning of the king's prize when Trombetti was thirty-seven years old, and after he had struggled amid the direst privations, changed the whole current of his life. He was appointed a professor at the University of Bologna. Linguists everywhere placed their collections at his service, for they recognized that the work he had already done would facilitate the researches and studies of all future inquirers. The scholars of the United States were especially prompt, and the Bureau of Ethnology, when he announced his intention of making a comparative study of Indian languages, sent him a large and valuable collection of works on the subject.

GAMBLING IS A VICE, BUT--

Famous Speculator Who Tries to Limit His Investments to "Sure Things" Has Had Many Stumbles.

James R. Keene, famous as a leader of the Wall Street bulls--or occasionally of the bears--asserts that he never gambles in stocks, and that gambling is one of the worst of vices.

"I try not to touch anything that is not worth while," he said. "If a stock is good and is selling under price it is legitimate to take that stock and push it up to its real value."

Several times in attempting to do that Keene has been cleaned out and left as poor as he was when he started out in California in the fifties. He was a sickly, nervous, near-sighted boy of twelve when he arrived in the West. Three years of life in the open built him up, and he started in as a prospector on his own account. It didn't pan out well, and he turned farmer for a while, left that work as a cowboy, and then put in a year as a newspaper reporter.

But the mines drew him back, and he managed to get ten thousand dollars out of the Comstock lode. With this he went to San Francisco, and when he saw how things were run on the exchange there he decided that he would enter the game. It took him three months to turn his ten thousand dollars into a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and it took his opponents two days to take that away from him and leave him not only without a cent, but also heavily in debt.

Young Keene's Period of Poverty.

The period that followed was one of poverty for Keene, and for two years he fought through it, working at whatever he could find to do, but all the time intent on getting back to the exchange. Finally, his creditors allowed him to join the Mining Exchange, and his knowledge of mining properties soon put him at the head of the mining stockbrokers.

Keene won his success as a broker through his painstaking study of the property in which he invested either for himself or for others, and through the amazing courage he evinced in taking a chance on properties in which he believed.

"Keene's too blamed conscientious," said one of his fellow-brokers. "Why, he's taken a week to look over some Idaho property, and he could just as well have handled the investments even if there wasn't a sign of metal there. He wouldn't lose anything."

That was not Keene's way. He was not in the game to make a little and risk nothing. He was willing to risk everything in order to make a big killing, and usually the campaigns that looked like wild and reckless gambles were backed by good, solid knowledge, gained after examination of the value of the property involved.

Keene's clients liked such methods, and they came to him in such numbers that in a short time he forced his way to the leading position among the San Francisco brokers, and as an operator on his own account he easily distanced all the others both in daring and in winnings.

Thirty years ago he had a fortune of six million dollars, and he started for Europe, but stopped off in New York to sell railroad shares short, for what he had seen on his trip East convinced him that there would be a break. His first deal netted him two hundred thousand dollars, and he threw up all thoughts of a European trip.

There was a story current at the time that Keene had all his wealth turned into gold, and the gold was done up in neat little parcels. With this, so he was credited with saying, he intended to wipe Jay Gould off the financial map. This story, however, is not true. It was Keene's intention to take a little flier, gain a little spending money, and continue on his way to Europe for rest.

But Wall Street fascinated him. Everything there was done upon such a lavish scale that it just suited him. So instead of taking a vacation he plunged into the market, and his winnings at first were enormous. During the next two years he cleared nine million dollars. Then he went into a wheat corner, and before he got out again he was squeezed dry, and a million and a half in debt.

Turning Failure into Success.

He fought the old San Francisco fight over again and he manifested the same old San Francisco courage.

They had pushed him down to such a point that he could no longer afford to live in New York, and he hired a little house in the suburbs. A cab was a luxury that was not to be thought of, and so every day, pleasant or stormy, Keene walked from the cars to his office. His lunch, and sometimes his dinner, consisted of fruit bought from a basket.

Around him were scores of men reduced to a similar pass, and most of them lost courage and drifted down and out. Courage was the only thing Keene did not lose. He hung on tight, and his former experience enabled him slowly to recover the position he had lost. Little by little, he got on to his feet, and when once he had wiped out his debts he began the fight again on a big scale, and has managed to make himself one of the richest men in the country.

The Tapestried Chamber.

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT.

This tale by Sir Walter Scott is justly reckoned among the most effective ghost stories ever written. Its art lies in its perfect simplicity, which for the moment convinces the reader of its truth and therefore makes the horror of it intensely real. Scott had himself a strain of superstition in his nature, derived in part from his Scottish ancestry and heightened by the strange stories and gruesome legends which had been told him by the peasants around whose fires he had sat at night while still a boy.

His belief in the supernatural appears and reappears in many of his most famous novels, as in the episode of the _Gray Specter_ in "Waverley," the second-sight of _Meg Merrilies_ in "Guy Mannering," and the weird figure of _Norna of the Fitful Head_ in "The Pirate." But no better example can be found of Scott's command of the mysterious as an element in fiction than this short story of "The Tapestried Chamber."

The following narrative is given from the pen, so far as memory permits, in the same character in which it was presented to the author's ear; nor has he claim to further praise, or to be more deeply censured, than in proportion to the good or bad judgment which he has employed in selecting his materials, as he has studiously avoided any attempt at ornament which might interfere with the simplicity of the tale.

At the same time it must be admitted that the particular class of stories which turns on the marvelous, possesses a stronger influence when told than when committed to print. The volume taken up at noonday, though rehearsing the same incidents, conveys a much more feeble impression than is achieved by the voice of the speaker on a circle of fireside auditors, who hang upon the narrative as the narrator details the minute incidents which serve to give it authenticity, and lowers his voice with an affectation of mystery while he approaches the fearful and wonderful part.

It was with such advantages that the present writer heard the following events related, more than twenty years since, by the celebrated Miss Seward, of Litchfield, who, to her numerous accomplishments, added, in a remarkable degree, the power of narrative in private conversation.

In its present form the tale must necessarily lose all the interest which was attached to it by the flexible voice and intelligent features of the gifted narrator. Yet still, read aloud, to an undoubting audience by the doubtful light of the closing evening, or, in silence, by a decaying taper, and amidst the solitude of a half-lighted apartment, it may redeem its character as a good ghost-story.

Miss Seward always affirmed that she had derived her information from an authentic source, although she suppressed the names of the two persons chiefly concerned. I will not avail myself of any particulars I may have since received concerning the localities of the detail, but suffer them to rest under the same general description in which they were first related to me; and, for the same reason, I will not add to or diminish the narrative by any circumstance, whether more or less material, but simply rehearse, as I heard it, a story of supernatural terror.