“You're right, Doctor, she said it different—no doubt o' that. I have a miserable habit of swearing. Got it years ago, when my office was the top of a barrel down at the Battery. It seemed to be necessary those days, and sometimes I thought it was a help in the steamboat business, but of course it wasn't. I ought to be ashamed of it, and I am. I'm like a horse with a hitch in his gait: it's bad, but you can't blame the horse so much, after all.”
There was a touch of greatness in his answer, it seemed to me, and gave us all a broader charity for the lion-mouthed men of that day, and God knows there were many of them. A young man who sat with us asked the Commodore if he might quote his answer to Doctor Deems.
“Why, sonny, I haven't the least objection,” said the Commodore. “Everybody knows that I swear, and they ought to know why, if they don't.”
He was always very frank in the matter of his faults and vices, and his word for the meanest thing in the world was “sneak.”
“Would you mind telling us the secret of your success?” the young man asked.
“There's no secret in success, boy,” said the Commodore. “There's always a secret in failure, but not in success.”
On our way to the St. Nicholas, McCarthy said to me: “To-morrow we're likely to see one of the greatest battles in history. It's between the Commodore on one side, and Fisk and his associates on the other.”
“And what's the prize?” I asked.
“The Erie road,” said the gentleman. “It's in the hands of wreckers and pirates who are cutting rates, and are likely to make us all kinds of trouble. The Commodore is buying the stock; it will probably be cornered to-morrow. I'm pretty well loaded, and am going to sell everything but my Hudson River and Harlem stock at the opening.”
“I wonder what he wants of more trouble, with all his riches,” I said. “He owns the Harlem, the Hudson River, the Central, the Lake Shore, and a part of the Michigan Southern. Isn't that enough?”