In October, 1870, Mr. Derham told me he had decided to give up the business and accept an offer which had been made him by one of the large importing firms, to go to England as its foreign representative.
He proposed that I take his business, paying him for the good-will twenty-five per cent of the profits for three years.
As I was not yet twenty years of age, he thought me too young to assume the business alone, and advised a partnership on equal terms with a Mr. Bulkley, then doing a brokerage business in a line that would work in well with ours, it being his idea to combine the two.
Adam Bulkley, a tall, handsome fellow of thirty-five, was a personal friend of Mr. Derham. He was a captain in the Seventh Regiment and had seen service. A man of attractive personality, he had many friends and had married the daughter of one of the wealthiest hide and leather brokers in the "swamp."
I do not know why, but in my first interview with this man I took an aversion to him. I tried to convince Mr. Derham that I could do better without a partner, but he thought otherwise, and not unnaturally, under the circumstances, I allowed matters to take their course as he planned them, and the partnership was made for a period of three years.
Early in November Mr. Derham sailed for England, leaving as his successor the firm of Bulkley & Stowe.
CHAPTER II
I MEET MY AFFINITY
My home was in Brooklyn. On my mother's side the family came from the old Dutch settlers of that section of Greater New York. My mother's father was a commissioned officer in the war of 1812. My father came from Connecticut, of English ancestry. I used to tell my mother the only thing I could never forgive her was that I was born in Brooklyn, and I have never gotten over my dislike for the place, though it is nearly thirty years since I left there.
The family for generations back have been Episcopalians, and from earliest childhood I was accustomed to attend regularly Sunday-school and church services.