,
Philadelphia's great banker, complaining that I had robbed him of
several hours of sleep. Having begun the book he could not lay it down
and retired at two o'clock in the morning after finishing. Several
similar letters were received. I remember Mr. Huntington, president of
the Central Pacific Railway, meeting me one morning and saying he was
going to pay me a great compliment.

"What is it?" Tasked.

"Oh, I read your book from end to end."

"Well," I said, "that is not such a great compliment. Others of our
mutual friends have done that."

"Oh, yes, but probably none of your friends are like me. I have not
read a book for years except my ledger and I did not intend to read
yours, but when I began it I could not lay it down. My ledger is the
only book I have gone through for five years."

I was not disposed to credit all that my friends said, but others who
had obtained the book from them were pleased with it and I lived for
some months under intoxicating, but I trust not perilously pernicious,
flattery. Several editions of the book were printed to meet the
request for copies. Some notices of it and extracts got into the
papers, and finally Charles Scribner's Sons asked to publish it for
the market. So "Round the World"[36] came before the public and I was
at last "an author."

[Footnote 36: _Round the World_, by Andrew Carnegie. New York and
London, 1884.]

A new horizon was opened up to me by this voyage. It quite changed my
intellectual outlook. Spencer and Darwin were then high in the zenith,
and I had become deeply interested in their work. I began to view the
various phases of human life from the standpoint of the evolutionist.
In China I read Confucius; in India, Buddha and the sacred books of
the Hindoos; among the Parsees, in Bombay, I studied Zoroaster. The
result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace. Where there
had been chaos there was now order. My mind was at rest. I had a
philosophy at last. The words of Christ "The Kingdom of Heaven is
within you," had a new meaning for me. Not in the past or in the
future, but now and here is Heaven within us. All our duties lie in
this world and in the present, and trying impatiently to peer into
that which lies beyond is as vain as fruitless.

All the remnants of theology in which I had been born and bred, all
the impressions that Swedenborg had made upon me, now ceased to
influence me or to occupy my thoughts. I found that no nation had all