the expanding city, in the busiest part of the business section and
in the best portion of the residential districts. Indeed, so rapidly did
its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for
him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. In 1819 he gave up
law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property.
An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth.
Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles
a year.

All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He
foreclosed mortgages with pitiless promptitude, and his adroit knowledge
of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous
pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. His
personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and
fastidious. "He was dry and caustic in his remarks," says Houghton, "and
very rarely spared the object of his satire. He was plain and careless
in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire."

HIS VAGARIES--SO CALLED.

There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully
deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the
comprehension of routine minds. None who had the appearance of
respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than
contemptuous rebuffs. For respectability in any form he had no use; he
scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding
sarcasm. But once any man or woman passed over the line of
respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that
person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely
sympathetic. The drunkard, the thief, the prostitute, the veriest wrecks
of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. This
was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and
shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them
himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one
personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality,
that of a philosopher.

Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen
Girard. He had a clear notion (for he was endowed with a highly
analytical and penetrating mind) that in giving a few coins to the
abased and the wretched he was merely returning in infinitesimal
proportion what the prevailing system, of which he was