areer. Perhaps the truest thing
was said by the old broker in the board whose reputation for piety was
only equaled by his reputation of always having money to loan at
exorbitant rates in a time of distress. He said to a group of downcast
operators, "In the midst of life we are in death."

XX

The place that Rodney Henderson occupied in the mind of the public was
shown by the attention the newspapers paid to his death. All the great
newspapers in all the cities of importance published long and minute
biographies of him, with pictorial illustrations, and day after day
characteristic anecdotes of his remarkable career. Nor was there, it is
believed, a newspaper in the United States, secular, religious, or
special, that did not comment upon his life. This was the more
remarkable in that he was not a public man in the common use of the word:
he had never interested himself in politics, or in public affairs,
municipal or State or national; he had devoted himself entirely to
building up his private fortune. If this is the duty of a citizen, he
had discharged it with singleness of purpose; but no other duty of the
citizen had he undertaken, if we except his private charities. And yet
no public man of his day excited more popular interest or was the subject
of more newspaper comment.

And these comments were nearly all respectful, and most of them kindly.
There was some justice in this, for Henderson had been doing what
everybody else was trying to do, usually without his good-fortune.
If he was more successful than others in trying to get rich, surely a
great deal of admiration was mingled with the envy of his career. To be
sure, some journals were very severe upon his methods, and some revived
the old stories of his unscrupulousness in transactions which had laid
him open to criminal prosecution, from the effects of which he was only
saved by uncommon adroitness and, some said, by legal technicalities.
His career also was denounced by some as wholly vicious in its effect
upon the youth of the republic, and as lowering the tone of public
morals. And yet it was remembered that he had been a frank, open-hearted
friend, kind to his family, and generous in contrast with some of his
close-fisted contemporaries. There was nothing mean about him; even his
rascalities, if you chose to call his transactions by that name, were on
a grand scale. To be sure, he would let nothing stand between him and
the consummation of his schem