of the safest, most sagacious in the
world. Practically all of his profits were invested by John Jacob Astor
in real estate outside the compact portion of the city of New York. As
the city grew out to his holdings, he would improve them, rent or sell
them, and reinvest further out. In this way the growth of the city
marked also the growth of his fortune, and this plan of investment has
been followed by his descendants to the present day, until they have
become by far the most important owners of real estate in New York City.
His son, William B. Astor, gave his life to the preservation and growth
of the vast property he inherited, and at his death had more than
doubled it, dividing an estate of $45,000,000 between his two sons.

Not that the whole thought of these two men was money-getting, for their
public gifts were numerous and important. The most noteworthy was the
Astor library, founded by John Jacob Astor at the suggestion of
Washington Irving, and largely added to by his son, the total amount of
the Astor donations to it exceeding a million dollars. But they stand as
two types of sagacious and hard-headed business men, to whom
money-making and the still more difficult art of money-keeping was an
instinctive accomplishment.

The second great American fortune was that founded by Cornelius
Vanderbilt, as remarkable and picturesque a character as this country
ever produced. Born on Staten Island in 1794, the son of a farmer in
moderate circumstances, the boy soon developed a remarkable talent for
trade. His father owned a sail-boat, in which he conveyed his produce
across the bay to the New York markets, and the boy soon learned to
manage this and was intrusted with these daily trips. When he was
sixteen years old, he bought a boat of his own, in which he ferried
passengers across the bay, and two years later he was owner of two boats
and captain of a third. This was the beginning of the great fleet of
steamers, sloops and schooners which he built up for the navigation of
the shores of New York bay and the Hudson river, which won him the title
of "Commodore," which clung to him all his life. Before he was forty
years old, he had accumulated a fortune of half a million dollars, and
was ready for those great financial operations which marked his later
life.

The discovery of gold in California led him to establish a passenger
line by way of Lake Nicaragua which netted him ten millions in ten
years; he established a