We are informed by one who knows him better almost than any one else, that he owes his excellent health chiefly to his love of horses. He possesses the power of leaving his business in his office, 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.