cept that Russian glue was very good and American very bad.

Now he studied the composition of glue, and gradually learned the secret
of making the best possible article which brought the highest price in
the market. He worked for twenty years without a book-keeper, clerk,
salesman, or agent. He rose with the dawn. When his men came at seven
o'clock to work, they found the factory fires lighted, and it was the
master who had lighted them. He watched closely and always the boiling
of his glue, and at mid-day, when the critical operation was over, he
drove into the city and went the round of his customers, selling them
glue and isinglass, and passed the evening in posting his books and
reading to his family.

He developed the glue business until it yielded him a profit of thirty
thousand dollars a year. He soon began to feel himself a capitalist, and
to count the years until he would be able to begin the erection of the
institution he had in his mind. But men who are known to have capital
are continually solicited to embark in enterprises, and he was under a
strong temptation to yield to such solicitations, for the scheme which
he had projected would involve a larger expenditure than could be
ordinarily made from one business in one lifetime. He used to tell the
story of his getting into the business of making iron, which was finally
a source of great profit to him.

"In 1828," he would say, "I bought three thousand acres of land within
the city limits of Baltimore for $105,000. When I first purchased the
property it was in the midst of a great excitement created by a promise
of the rapid completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which had
been commenced by a subscription of five dollars per share. In the
course of the first year's operations they had spent more than the five
dollars per share. But the road had to make so many short turns in going
around points of rocks that they found they could not complete the road
without a much larger sum than they had supposed would be necessary;
while the many short turns in the road seemed to render it entirely
useless for locomotive purposes. The principal stockholders had become
so discouraged that they said they would not pay any more, and would
lose all they had already paid in. After conversing with them, I told
them that if they would hold on a little while I would put a small
locomotive on the road, which I thought would demonstrate the
practicability of using steam-