and never
thinking of it during his hours of recreation.

Out on the road behind a fast team, or seated at whist at the
Club-House, he enters gayly into the humors of the hour. He is rigid
on one point only;--not to talk or hear of business out of business
hours.

Being asked one day what he considered to be the secret of success in
business, he replied:--

"Secret? There is no secret about it. All you have to do is to attend
to your business and go ahead."

With all deference to such an eminent authority, we must be allowed to
think that that is not the whole of the matter. Three things seem
essential to success in business: 1. To _know_ your business. 2. To
attend to it. 3. To keep down expenses until your fortune is safe from
business perils.

On another occasion he replied with more point to a similar
question:--

"The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do
till I have done it."

He is, indeed, a man of little speech. Gen. Grant himself is not more
averse to oratory than he. Once, in London, at a banquet, his health
was given, and he was urged to respond. All that could be extorted
from him was the following:--

"Gentlemen, I have never made a fool of myself in my life, and I am
not going to begin now. Here is a friend of mine (his lawyer) who can
talk all day. He will do my speaking."

Nevertheless, he knows how to express his meaning with singular
clearness, force, and brevity, both by the tongue and by the pen. Some
of his business letters, dictated by him to a clerk, are models of
that kind of composition. He is also master of an art still more
difficult,--that of _not_ saying what he does not wish to say.

As a business man he is even more prudent than he is bold. He has
sometimes remarked, that it has never been in the power of any man or
set of men to prevent his keeping an engagement. If, for example, he
should bind himself to pay a million of dollars on the first of May,
he would at once provide for fulfilling his engagement in such a
manner that no failure on the part of others, no contingency, private
or public, could prevent his doing it. In other words, he would have
the money where he could be sure of finding it on the day.

No one ever sees the name of Cornelius Vanderbilt on a subscription
paper, nor ever will. In his charities, which are numerous and
liberal, he exhibits the reticence which marks his conduct as a man of
business. His object is to render rea