y. Not that he dreamed then of floating steel
battleships. But he did foresee steel in new and various uses. Later on
he was experimenting with steel cable at the very time Roebling made it
a commercial possibility, and with it the modern suspension bridge and
the elevator. He never quite forgave Roebling. That failure of his, the
difference only of a month or so, was one of the few disappointments
of his prosperous, self-centered, orderly life. That, and Howard's
marriage. And, at the height of his prosperity, the realization that
Howard's middle-class wife would never bear a son.

The city he chose was a small city then, yet it already showed signs of
approaching greatness. On the east side, across the river, he built his
first plant, a small one, with the blast heated by passing through cast
iron pipes, with the furnaceman testing the temperature with strips of
lead and zinc, and the skip hoist a patient mule.

He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had,
as time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap and
plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.
Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vast
impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be
had.

The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there was
a struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things. He went to
England to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid,
tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alien
in the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick house
in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and run
on English lines. He soon became the leading citizen. He was one of the
committee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from the very
beginning he took his place in the social life.

He found it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with
dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous
dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his
timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and
the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his
table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrial
pioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the city the
center of great business and great railroads. They talked of its coal,
its river,