“I have done a pleasant work,” he said, modestly.
“And the achievements of your schoolmate Gould do not appeal to you as having anything in them worth aiming for?” I questioned.
“Not for me. I think my life is better for having escaped such vast and difficult interests.”
The gentle, light-hearted naturalist and recluse came down the long hillside with me, “to put me right” on the main road. I watched him as he retraced his steps up the steep, dark path, lantern in hand. His sixty years sat lightly upon him, and as he ascended I heard him singing. Long after the light melody had died away, I saw the serene little light bobbing up and down in his hand, disappearing and reappearing, as the lone philosopher repaired to his hut and his couch of content.
XXI
Vreeland’s Romantic Story: How He Came to Transport a Million Passengers a Day
A SHORT time ago, New York learned with interest and some astonishment, that the head of its greatest transportation system, Herbert H. Vreeland, had received from several of his associates as individuals, a “valentine” present of $100,000, in recognition of his superb management of their properties. Many New Yorkers then learned, for the first time, what railroad experts throughout the country had long known, that the transportation of a million people a day in New York’s busy streets, without serious friction or public annoyance, is not a matter of chance, but is the result of perhaps the most perfect traffic organization ever created, at the head of which is a man, quiet, forceful, able, with the ability of a great general—a master and at the same time, a friend of men,—himself one for whom in the judgment of his associates almost any higher railroad career is possible.
Thirty years ago Mr. Vreeland, then a lad thirteen years old, was, to use his own humorous, reminiscent phrase, “h’isting ice” on the Hudson River, one of a gang of eighteen or twenty men and boys filling the ice carts for retail city delivery. A picture just brought to light, shows him among the force lined up to be photographed, as a tall, loosely built, hatchet-faced lad in working garb, with a fragment of a smile on his face, as if he could appreciate the contrast of the boy of that day with the man of the future.
How do these things happen? What was the divine spark in this boy’s brain and heart that should lift him out of the crowd of the commonplace to the position of responsibility and influence in the world which he now occupies? If my readers could have been present at the interview kindly granted by Mr. Vreeland to the writer, and could have heard him recalling his early life and its many struggles and disappointments with a smile that was often near a tear, they would have gone away feeling that nothing is impossible to him who dares, and, above all else, who works, and they would have derived inspiration far greater than can possibly be given in these written words.