CHAPTER XIV

"I WANT TO MAKE OIL"

At this writing there is an old man named Samuel Van Syckel, over eighty years of age, partly paralyzed, but still vigorous, living in an obscure back street of Buffalo, very poor, though his fertile brain has helped to make millionaires of many others. Van Syckel's life has been one of ups and downs, possible only in the case of an adventurous mind seeking the golden-fleece in a new industry and in a new country. Of all the brave and ingenious men who have experimented, invented, and pioneered to realize for mankind all the surpassing possibilities of the coming oil age, he is one of the most notable. He had already made and lost one or two fortunes when we find him, about 1860, with a little still in Jersey City, making roof-tar.

He was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, the son of a farmer, and worked on the farm until he was of age, when he went into business. The panic of 1857 caught him with sails wing-a-wing, conducting all at once, and prosperously, grist-mills, linseed-oil mills, grain distilleries--these he had to take for a debt--several stores, cooper-shops, and two or three farms.

He failed because he had gone security for others, but he paid 100 cents on the dollar, and went to New York City. There he became a member of the Corn Exchange, and opened a commission-house for the sale of produce. His country friends had such confidence in his honesty and judgment that within six months he had done a business of $400,000. But he discovered that of the 1500 members of the Exchange all but one had failed, and many of them several times. He saw that he was in a position where, through the inability of some other dealer to fulfil his contract, he might be swamped any day, and lose all he had himself and all the thousands intrusted to him by his friends. He had old-fashioned notions about losing friends' money, to himself or to any one else. He left the produce business. He went to making roof-tar in Jersey City, and in 1860 built one of the first refineries for making kerosene out of petroleum. When "Colonel" Drake, in 1859, found out that oil could be got by drilling, Van Syckel was one of those the new source of supply found waiting for it. He began refining in a small way, and, with an ardor which he has carried into everything he has done, he plunged into the study of new ways of refining the oil which then started to flow with embarrassing riches out of thousands of wells. The study of oil-refining became his passion, as, fortunately for us less gifted folk, the study of the effects of heat on clay, of sulphur on the gum of the caoutchouc-tree, of steam on the lid of the teakettle, were in their time passions with Palissy, Goodyear, and Watts. In the work of his life, forcing its secrets out of this difficult liquid, he has been very successful. Earthly reward the old inventor has none, but, sitting in his story-and-a-half cottage, what he mourns most is that he has been and is denied the opportunity of work. Tortured by restless and inventive energy, which age and disappointment and betrayal have not sufficed to snuff out, his continuous word is: "I want to make oil."

When petroleum from the new wells began to come to New York, dozens of little stills were built all over the Jersey flats, many of them by Jews and Greeks. "Stills kept burning up all around," he says to his visitor. "Almost every day there was an explosion somewhere from the gases. I told my wife to give me my oldest clothes and send me my meals. I was going to find out all about this business. There was a pile of roofing-gravel under a shed by my stills. I went there and slept and ate, day and night, and watched the stills and the pipes, the gases, the oils, and all. All the sleep and rest I had for months was there. It was while watching these work that my greatest idea came to me, of making oil by a continuous process, so that I could feed in petroleum at one end and have kerosene running out at the other in an unceasing stream, day after day, without stopping the whole establishment, as the oil-refineries still do, every day or two, to cool off and clean up. By the old process, still in use, when the charge in the still of perhaps 1000 barrels had been refined, we had to draw the fires and wait perhaps ten hours--the best part of a day--for the still to cool off, so that the men could go in with iron chisels to chop it all loose and clean it out. This would take four or five men from four to six hours. The still would be idle for a day and a half, and then the same process would have to be gone through with again with every charge. All over the flats the Jews and Greeks kept burning up. The Common Council of Jersey City said we must stop refining. The rest joined a great combination to fight the Common Council, but I made up my mind to go where the oil was produced. I went to Titusville in 1865. I had all the money I could want. Some rich men told me to draw on them up to $100,000 for anything there was 'snacks in' for them."

This was about the time the founders of the oil combination began in Cleveland, with "no money."

"What makes I found in Titusville!" continued Van Syckel. "I went all up and down the creek. They were glad to get 65 gallons of kerosene out of 100 gallons of petroleum, while I could get 80. I think the head of the oil combination had a little still cocked up in the woods there--a one-horse, pig-pen kind of a place at the bend of the creek, a cobbled-up sort of a mud-hole, with a water-trough to bring the oil to the still. He was not there himself; he stayed in Cleveland. I didn't ever think anything about him then. I was 'way above him. I first saw him some years after, about 1872, in a refiner's office. He was talking up some scheme he had for a combination of refineries. He said he didn't want to have the market overstocked. He was just a common-looking kind of a man among the rest of us there. I saw, when I reached Titusville, that the most money was to be made in shipping oil. I made a dollar a barrel, and in six months I was $100,000 in pocket. The land speculation I wouldn't touch. It was wild. It scared me to see men sitting around on logs, and trading off little pieces of land for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was the first man to lay a pipe line to carry oil up and down the hills of Pennsylvania."

"The first successful pipe line," says the United States Census Report of 1885, "was put down by Samuel Van Syckel, of Titusville, in 1865, and extended from Pithole to Miller's Farm, a distance of four miles."[342]

"When I first came to the oil country all the oil had to be teamed from the wells to the railways, over roads with no bottom in wet weather. Sometimes a line of teams a mile long would be stuck in the mud. Often the teamsters would dump their load, worth $5 a barrel, and abandon it. Mules would get so discouraged that they would lie down and die in the roadway before they could be helped. The teamsters knew their power. They charged accordingly. They charged for looking at the oil to see how many barrels their teams could draw. They charged extra for every mud-hole they struck, and if the wagon-wheels went to the hubs they doubled their bills. I paid $2 to $4 a barrel for teaming, and was shipping 4000 barrels a week. The teamsters were making more money than the well-owners, and didn't care whether they hauled oil or not. All this set me to thinking. I hit on the pipe line idea, and announced that I would carry the oil by pipe from the wells to the railroad. That was too much for the people of the oil regions. Everybody laughed me down. Even my particular friends, with whom I used to take my meals at the hotel, jeered and gibed me so that I took to coming and going through the back door and through the kitchen, and ate by myself. 'Do you expect to put a girdle around the earth?' was the favorite sarcasm. I knew it would cost a great deal--$100,000 perhaps; but I had the money. I built it--two two-inch lines, side by side--between June and November in 1865, and turned the oil in. The pipe was a perfect success from the first barrel of oil that was pumped in. It flowed, just as I expected, up hill and down dale. The line was four miles long--from the Miller Farm to Pithole--with two or three branches.

"Then the teamsters threatened to kill any one who worked on the pipe line or who used it. They would drive astraddle of it, dig down to it, put logging chains around it and pull it out of the ground, and leave the oil, worth $4 to $5 a barrel, running to waste out of the holes. I sent to New York for some carbines, hired 25 men to patrol the line, and put a stop to that. I put up the line as security for some debts owed by my partner, under an agreement that when its profits had paid the debt it was to be returned to me. The debt was wiped out in a few months, but I never got the line back.... I had no money left to sue for it. This was the end of my pipe line. It has grown into a system thousands of miles long, second in importance only to the railroad, and out of it many, many millions of profit have been made, but not a cent has it yielded me. Then I went to refining oil, and, with a partner, built one of the first big refineries in the oil regions. There has been no oil refined in this country since 1870 without the help of my improvements. Some I patented, some I did not. The refiners at Titusville were hard put to it for pure water. I drove pipes through the river into the second gravel under the river, and got the finest cold water there could be. This anticipated the 'driven wells' several years. I put steam into the stills" (this had been done before both by European and American refiners). "I found out how to burn the uncondensable gases. I showed one of my neighbors how to do this, and he saved $20 a day after that in his coal bills, but I got nothing for it. Each new thing I proposed, up would go everybody's hands and eyes, and oh, what a rumbling there would be! I never made money so fast as in this refinery. We did not use the continuous process. I had not patented it, and I had partners whom it would not have been right for me to experiment with. Our profits were over a dollar on every barrel. We sold our product as fast as we could make it. We made $125,000 in fifteen months, although we paid as high as $8 a barrel for crude. I worked like a slave to make good the loss of $100,000 in my pipe line. I worked and watched day and night, and knew I was beating them all making oil. My partners were church elders, who could never find words enough to express their indignation about the way my pipe line had been taken away from me, and so virtuous that they never smoked a cigar nor drank a drop. I got into no end of lawsuits with them, and I lost my property again. I sold a part interest in my patent to some one who was afterwards taken into this oil combination, and it now claims that they own all my patents. They have frightened off or bought off every one who has tried to use any of my inventions."

The rest of the old man's story was told by him under oath in a suit he brought against members of the combination.[343] "The idea of continuous distillation, as it was suggested to me at Jersey City, was always in my brain ever since. I made an attempt to construct such works in 1876 under Mr. Cary. I run out of money. I had been robbed out of my pipe line that cost me $100,000, and my oil-refinery in which I had more than $100,000. Mr. Cary said he was going to build a little refinery. He said he had $10,000 that we might use in making oil in a continuous way. We got our lease and broke ground in 1876. We had not got very far--we got the pipe on the ground and some brick and one old-fashioned still--when" the representative of the oil combination, one of its principal members, "came on to the ground ... the 15th of December, 1876. He asked me if I would not take a salary and not build these works in opposition to them. I told him 'No.' Then he wanted I should take a life salary, one that would support me for life comfortably. I told him I did not want his salary; I wanted to build this refinery and make oil in a new continuous way. He then wanted me to let him build it. He said, 'We will build it for you.' I objected to this. He then said that I could make no money if I did refine oil. He also said if I did I could not ship it. He said he would say to me confidentially that they had made such arrangements with the railroads in reference to freight--in reference to getting cars--he knew I could make no money if I did make oil."

Almost on the same day--May 14, 1888--on which Van Syckel was giving the jury this undisputed account, sustained by the judge and jury, of how the combination used "arrangements with the railroads" against its rivals, another pioneer, even more distinguished, was relating his almost identical experience before the committee of Congress investigating trusts, May 3, 1888. This was Joshua Merrill, "to whom," said S. Dana Hayes, State Chemist of Massachusetts, "more than to any one else, belongs the honor of bringing this manufacture to its present advanced state."[344] Merrill's inventions and successful labors are described in the United States Census Report on Petroleum, 1885. He was at work guessing the riddles of petroleum as long ago as 1854.[345]

From 1866 to 1888 he and his partners ran a refinery at Boston.

"What has become of it?"

"We have recently dismantled it."[346]

For several years their business had been unprofitable. There were two causes, he explained. One was that they made a better quality of oil than the average, at a cost which they could not recoup from the prices established in the market by poorer oils. The other cause was the extraordinary charges made against his firm by the railways in Boston which brought their crude.

His firm had their own tank-cars, in which their crude oil came from Pennsylvania. From Olean to Boston his freight cost him the last few years 50 cents a barrel. From the depot in Boston, to get it over two miles of track to his refinery, cost him $10 a car, or about $1.25 a barrel. This was at the rate of about 42-1/2 cents a ton a mile. The average freight rate for the United States is about half a cent a ton a mile. His rate was an advance of 8400 per cent. on the average. He appealed to the Railroad Commission of Massachusetts.

"We wrote to the commissioners that we thought the charge was very high, and they ought to interfere to have it reduced. But it was not done.

"We made repeated efforts, personal solicitations, to the railroad officers, and to the railroad commissioners also, but it was the established rate."[347]

Two roads participated in this charge of $10 for hauling a car two miles. One of these was the New York and New England road, whose haul was a mile and a half, and its charge $6.

"Who was president of the New York and New England road?"

The dismantled witness's experience had made him timid.

"I do not know."

"Do you not know," he was asked, "that one of the oil trustees is president?"

"Yes, sir."[348]

The same railroad is the principal New England link in the lines of circumvallation which the combination in coal, hard and soft, American and Nova Scotian, is drawing about the homes and industries of the country. His company sold their tank-cars to the oil combination, as "we no longer had any use for them."[349]

"I was thirty-two years in the oil business," the veteran said, mournfully, as he left the stand. "It was the business of my life."[350]

To return to Van Syckel. After his warning to the inventor that he could get no cars and make no money, even if his new idea proved a success, the representative of the combination invited Van Syckel to put himself in its hands.

"He said they would furnish the money to test the invention and pay me all it was worth. I felt a little startled at the rebates, and I knew it before, but I did not know it was so bad as he had figured it out. I then asked him who of his company would agree to furnish me money to test the patent and to pay all it was worth. He asked me who I wanted to agree with. I then asked him if a man" (naming him) "that I had had more or less dealings with" (one of the trustees) "would agree to what he had said. He said he had no doubt he would. He said, 'We will go and see him, and go at his expense.' He said he would take the works off my hands at cost, and would satisfy my partner to stop building them if I would go to New York, and I think it was the next day when we went to New York."

They went to the office of the member of the combination whom Van Syckel had said he would confide in. "He seemed to be very glad to see me, and very sorry to learn I had been so unfortunate in the oil regions. He then asked me what these patent works would cost in a small way to prove that oil could be successfully made under continuous distillation. I told him it could be done for about $10,000. He said they would give it, ... and if it proved a success they would give me $100,000. He said it was worth more. He would give me $125 a month to support my family during the time I was building and testing it. I said, 'Let us put what we have agreed upon in writing.' He begged off for a time. He said it could be done at Titusville just as well. He saw I was not quite satisfied being cut off in that way, so he took my hand and said he would give me his word and honor what they had agreed upon there should be put in writing at Titusville Monday morning. I did not want to press him any harder. I told him I would take the $125 a month until the thing was tested. If it proved a failure the whole thing should come back where it started from, and if it proved a success he was to pay me $100,000" (for the patents and the business). "He said we all understood it, then. I went home." Van Syckel called upon the Titusville member of the trust. "He begged off from me the same as the other did in New York; said they were pressed with business. He said they would fix it this afternoon, or words to that effect." Instead of building for him, as it had agreed, the combination, the moment he placed himself in its hands, destroyed the building he had already begun.

"What did they do with the works when they bought them?"

"They took the brick that was on the cars and hauled them to other places, I suppose, and I don't know where they threw the still. They kept that leased property during the five years for a junk-yard. I went the next day to see him, and pressed him about it the best I could. I could not accomplish anything; he appeared to be busy, or kept out of the way. I kept chasing to his office. I tried to catch him and talk over what I should depend on, where we were going to build; but he kept out of the way. He said he had not seen their folks. In July, 1879, more than three years after our contract in New York, he said they had had a meeting of all their wise-heads, and they had called in chemists, and they all unanimously agreed that oil could not be made by a continuous process, and gave that as a reason for not furnishing the money to build these works. I said, in reply, 'I am not responsible for the knowledge that the "oil combination" has for refining oil; neither would I exchange mine for all they have got combined. You said you would furnish me the money and build these works, and do as you had agreed to do.' I walked out. That was about the last I had to say to him on that subject."

"Did you after that build, or undertake to build, an oil refinery to test your continuous process?"

"Yes, sir; in connection with a German. He was going to build a small refinery. He said he would build it my way, if I would let him use it in the new way. He constructed it on that principle; but he was slow--he was a very slow man to deal with. We ran ... twenty days without stopping" (to clean out the stills).

"And it actually ran that length of time?"

"Yes, sir."

"What became of these works?"

"Hauled off to the junk-yard"--by one of the companies in the combination. It "bought them out after we just got them under way, and then tore them down and hauled them off."

"You then brought them up to Buffalo, and tried to put them into the Solar Works?"

"Yes, sir."

"What became of those?"

"They eventually went the same way."

In court the combination claimed that Van Syckel's was an inferior process, but it had not left it to die the natural death of the inferior process.

"And how about the expense of the two ways?" he was asked.

"The same help that would make 1000 barrels the old way, to take three or four days, I would make in the new process in one day; the old way takes about a ton of coal more and gets less oil, and the oil is not near so good."

No contradiction was offered by the defendants of any of these statements. Uncontradicted evidence showed that the new process was cheaper and produced better oil than the old processes. Stillmen from the Herman and Solar refineries, in which Van Syckel tried his new process after the combination refused to build for him, testified to the practical success of his method. "We must have run these continuous works for two months while I was there" (at the Solar).[351]

"We kept Van Syckel's process running right along continuously for sixteen days" (at the Herman refinery).[352]

"We did not have to clean out the patent stills, while by the old process they would have to be cleaned out about every day or thirty-six hours."[353]

A number of residents of Titusville, dealers in oil and consumers, testified to the superiority of the illuminant Van Syckel produced. It burned much better than that made by the monopoly, several said. "The burning qualities was extraordinarily good." "It gave better satisfaction to my customers." "It did not gum the lamp-wicks, and did not smell."[354]

This was done in spite of rusty and choked-up pipes, defective stills and apparatus.

One of the owners of the Solar, who was a practical refiner and the overseer of the works, testified that he had seen Van Syckel's continuous process run successfully both in Titusville and Buffalo:

"The result was much beyond my expectation."

"How long did you run the works?"

"I think about two weeks."

"What was the cause of it stopping?"

"The president of the company, also the treasurer, had been to New York two or three times; after the second or third visit he came back seemingly disgusted with the business; afraid of losing his money if he continued any longer, and quit."

"Was there a mortgage upon your property?"

"Yes, sir." It had been foreclosed, he said, in conclusion, by one of the leading members of the oil combination.[355]

The only thing Van Syckel can do to carry out his part of the contract he does. He develops his invention. He is successful in his application to the United States patent-office. He made his contract with the combination in 1876, and got four patents thereafter in 1877, 1878, and 1879.

"Well," it was said in court, "they are a large concern; they would make money out of this; I should think they would want it if it is such a good thing." "Why, my dear man, they have got a monopoly of the business, anyway," Van Syckel replied. "They don't care what kind of oil they sell; but they have got a plant that has cost them millions of dollars that they have got to change, and all that sort of thing, if they take my patent. That is the situation."

He lived on the $125 a month while he was testing and proving the invention. In July, 1880, when four years of his life had been thus wasted, the allowance was changed, without notice or his consent, to $75 a month. The next month he was refused even that sum "unless I signed a receipt in full of all demands, and I walked out without it."

His pipe line has become a part of the net-work of pipe lines of which the oil combination boasts. His refinery of 1869, one of the largest built in western Pennsylvania up to that time, passed into its hands. Three times in succession, after it refuses to build for him as it agreed, he arranges to put his idea of continuous distillation into use, and in each case the refinery in which he sets up his pipes and stills is bought up by it and destroyed. He is kept dangling for years by its policy of delay. Then his independent efforts are broken up; capitalists are made afraid of him. He can get no means for building new works. "Ever since I went into their hands," he said in court, "I have been just as I am now. I could not make oil; could not build a refinery; could not get anybody help me to do it; and here I have stood these last twelve years, and I want to be out. That is just where they want to keep me, so I cannot make any oil. It is the whole profit of the whole of it. They hold me to my contract, and they break theirs."

When twelve years had gone by, and he found that they would neither build for him as agreed nor let any one else build for him, Van Syckel turned to the law and sued them for damages. On the trial all the facts as we have stated were admitted--the abandonment of the enterprise in consequence of the threats that he would not be allowed to ship and market his oil; the interviews in New York; the contract; the sale; Van Syckel's later efforts to make oil in other refineries; his success in producing better and cheaper oil; its popularity; the purchase and destruction of the works using the new method. Not a word of evidence was adduced in disproof. The judge and the jury found all these questions in Van Syckel's favor.

The defence was twofold. It was admitted that the two representatives Van Syckel had dealt with had made the contract as he described it. The members of the combination did not deny that. But, they argued, it was not legally binding. "We simply concede," said these great men to the Court, "that they made a contract, but leaving it to the corporation itself to decide upon it.... There cannot be the slightest claim that the company was bound by a contract of that character." On this point they were defeated in the trial. Their second defence was that there were no damages. "The trouble is," they said, "that there are no damages sustained, no damages whatever sustained." They took the ground that his possessing a creative mind was the cause of Van Syckel's ruin, not their betrayal of him. "Mr. Van Syckel," they argued to the Court, sympathetically, "is an instance of what it means to get out a patent, and deal in patents--in nine cases out of ten. He was an inventive man. He has got out a good many patents. No question they were meritorious patents. And what is the result? Poverty, a broken heart, an enfeebled intellect, and a struggle now for the means of subsistence by this lawsuit. So that, if your honor please, there is nothing here from which we can determine what the original value of this patent was." The jury and the judge decided against them, and held there was a contract, legal and binding. That brought them face to face with the question of damages, and here the ruling of the judge saved them, as the decision of another judge saved other members of the combination in the criminal case in the same city, about the same time.[356] The judge ordered the jury to find the damages at six cents, and the jury--in the evolution of freedom juries appear to have become merely clerks of the Court--did so. "This direction of a verdict," said the Court to Van Syckel, "decides every other question of the case in your favor."

Six cents damages for breach of such a contract, and in Buffalo $250 fine for conspiracy to blow up a rival refinery! Here are figures with which to begin a judicial price-list of the cost of immunity for crimes and wrongs.

Lawyer Moot, Van Syckel's counsel, deferentially asked the Court to suggest where was the defect in the proof of damages. It would be "the wildest speculation and guesswork," the Court said, for the jury to attempt to compute the damages.

"Then the Court is unable to suggest any particular defect in the proof?"

The Court evaded the point of the counsel, and repeated in general terms that there was no testimony upon which a jury could assess damages.

Those whom he was suing did not disprove that, by threats of making it impossible for him to get transportation, they had driven Van Syckel to abandon his own business, and make a contract with them by which they were to pay him $100,000 for his new process, if successful. The Court held the contract binding. They had not furnished the money and works to test the inventions as they had agreed to do; but he had nevertheless gone on and completed the invention, so that patents were granted for it by the government. He had tested the invention in other works, they failing him, and had proved it a success; they had thereupon purchased and destroyed these works; he was beggared, and nobody else under these circumstances could be induced to venture money on his invention. Upon these facts, judicially ascertained, the judge refused to let the jury compute the damages, and ordered them to find the damages "nominal," as another judge sentenced their associates in Buffalo to "nominal" punishment.

"There are many things known to the law," said Parnell to the president of the Special Commission trying the Irish members of Parliament, "which are strange to a non-legal mind."

This pioneer, inventor, and true Captain of Industry, real creator of wealth, has ever since had his neck bent to the pressure of hands too heavy for him. While all over the earth homes are brighter, knowledge is more easily got, and civilization forwarded, because of what his head has thought and his hands have done, he has retired to what is, in fact, a life of penal exile. He has been cut off from the darlings of his brain. Like the political prisoners of Siberia, he can eat and sleep and dress, but he cannot go into the world. His mind is at work there, in every factory and pipe line and lamp; but he must sit, unknown and unrewarded, in his pine cottage on unpaved Maurice Street, ploughed up in the prairies on the outskirts of Buffalo. Dearer than money to him, as to all such creative minds, would be the privilege of feeding the appealing activities of his brain with work. But he is banished from work. He has been set down outside the frontier of industry, and commanded never to return. No one dares buy or sell of him, nor adventure labor or money with him. He is an outcast. This is his greatest grief. The day I visited him he came into the sitting-room from the patch of garden behind the house. "I keep busy," he said, "to keep my mind off--anything to keep busy, if it is only pulling weeds." He is glad to see visitors. "I have been knocked out," he said, "so that nobody now comes to see me." His clear gray-blue eyes, tall, strong frame, firm mouth, large features and limbs, eager face, fit the facts of his career. He is one of the type of country-bred, hard-working American manhood of the last generation. There are no visionary lines in his face, as in his life there have been no impracticabilities, except his too great trustfulness. Gambling oil exchanges, wild oil-land speculations, inside "deals" with railroad freight agents, have never caught him. He has been a money-maker--not a money-taker. To-day, at eighty, the only thing he asks is that he may have the chance to work out his ideas. He talks patiently and courteously, with perfect intelligence and memory, but every once in a while breaks in with an outburst of what is evidently an unceasing refrain within--"I want to make oil."

The diminutive room we are in is stark in its simplicity and poverty. A paragraph in the morning paper on the table tells of "a massive oaken case, similar to a bookcase," which one of the chief reapers where Van Syckel has sowed is having put into his stable in New York. "It has doors of polished oak, with brass hinges, and heavy plate-glass. The inside will be lined with purple plush, and, when completed, the bits which shine in the mouths of his trotters and coach-horses will be arranged inside of this magnificent case in rows, ready for use, as well as an appropriate ornament for the stable."

It is better to be one of the king's horses than one of the king's men. But no words of envy pass his lips. He does not seem to repress them. He simply appears never to feel them. It chanced that as I left him, standing on the uppermost of the three wooden steps of his cottage, bleakness all about, "plain living" within, plain enough to satisfy the hardest climber for "high thinking," it chanced that his last words to me were--"I want to make oil," with an appeal to seek for him the opportunity so long denied. These words, plain and homely as they must seem to those who feed their appetite for the sublime and heroic with the highly varnished sayings of the battle-field and illustrious death-beds, will never cease to ring in my ears with a tone of greatness.[357]