In evidence of Mr. Plant’s popularity and the esteem in which he was held by his associates in business as early as 1861, it may be mentioned that on January 1st of that year, at Augusta, Ga., he was made the recipient of a magnificent testimonial in the form of a service of solid silver bearing the following inscription:

PRESENTED TO
H. B. PLANT
BY HIS ASSOCIATES IN THE ADAMS
SOUTHERN EXPRESS
AS A TESTIMONIAL OF THEIR
RESPECT AND ESTEEM
AUGUSTA, GA.,
JANUARY 1, 1861

In 1873, eleven years after the death of his first wife, Mr. Plant married Miss Margaret Josephine Loughman, the only daughter of Martin Loughman, of New York City. She is descended from an ancient and noble family, whose ancestral estate, eight miles long, in the Land of the Shamrock, is now occupied by Lord Dundrum. Mrs. Plant’s great grandmother on her mother’s side was Lady Mary Murphy, of Ballymore Castle, Ballymore. Her own mother was Miss Ellen O’Duyer, said to have been a woman of great beauty and to have been descended from the Kings of Munster.

The finest train of Pullman palace cars we ever saw was prominent among the beautiful exhibits at the Atlanta Exposition of last year (1896). Their exquisite upholstering and decoration owed their superlative finish to the refined taste of Mrs. Plant. The Tampa Bay Hotel, more like a palace of art, is indebted to this same lady for much of its elaborate furnishing and artistic adornment. The two hand-carved mantelpieces in the salon, the admiration of all visitors, as well as some of the fine cabinet-work in the gentlemen’s reading-room, evinced her business capacity and fine sense of the fitness of beautiful furnishing that costs no more than the plain and commonplace. She has given much time and earnest effort to the selection, purchase, and direction of the upholstering and decorations of that finest of American-built steamships, La Grande Duchesse, just completed at Newport News.

The impress of her forcible character and refined taste can be detected in many places throughout the great system over which her husband so ably presides, but is known only to those who are admitted to the inner circles of its operations.

CHAPTER VII.

Education from Books, and from Experience—Keen Intuitions—Abreast of the Progress—Mr. Plant’s After-Dinner Speech at Tampa Banquet Given him by Tampa Board of Trade, March, 18, 1886—Location of Tampa—In Territorial Days Had a Military Reservation—In 1884 Population about Seven Hundred—Its Cosmopolitan Population now—Many Cubans and Spaniards in Tampa—Tobacco Industry—Phosphate Abounds in this Part of the State—Much of it Shipped to the North and to Europe—Plant System Gives Impetus to the Prosperity of the Place—Its Progress the Last Five or Six Years.

TEXT-BOOKS are necessary instruments in a systematic course of instruction, especially in the period of school and college days, but their chief value lies, not so much in the actual knowledge which they impart as in the intellectual training which they give for the acquisition of knowledge in the future. Hence, as civilization advances and the schools of higher education increase, less dependence is placed on text-books, and more emphasis is laid upon lectures and laboratories by which the student is stimulated to original investigation and independent thought. The knowledge of current events which we derive from observation of human nature, and which gives us great opportunities to do good to ourselves and to others, is not acquired from books.