the railroad upon a sound
financial basis. After such a remarkable career "blindness to the
future" seems unkindly given, as doubtless it would have been a source
of great satisfaction to this Vanderbilt progenitor could he have known
before passing onward that his hard-earned wealth would eventually
enrich his descendants, even the representatives of nobility.

I have before me an invitation to a New York Assembly, dated the 29th of
January, 1841, addressed to my father and mother, which has followed my
wanderings through seventy years. All of the managers, a list of whom I
give, were representative citizens as well as prominent society men of
the day:

Abm. Schermerhorn, J. Swift Livingston,
Edmd. Pendleton, Jacob R. LeRoy,
James W. Otis, Thos. W. Ludlow,
Wm. Douglas, Chas. McEvers, Jr.,
Henry Delafield, William S. Miller,
Henry W. Hicks, Charles C. King.

Abraham Schermerhorn belonged to a wealthy New York family, and Edmund
Pendleton was a Virginian by birth who resided in New York where he
became socially prominent. James W. Otis was of the Harrison Gray Otis
family of Boston and, as I have already stated, I was at school with his
daughter, Sally. William Douglas was a bachelor living in an attractive
residence on Park Place, where he occasionally entertained his friends.
He belonged to a thrifty family of Scotch descent and had two sisters,
Mrs. Douglas Cruger and Mrs. James Monroe, whose husband was a namesake
and nephew of the ex-President. Early in the last century their mother,
Mrs. George Douglas, gave a ball, and I insert some doggerel with
reference to it written by Miss Anne Macmaster, who later became Mrs.
Charles Russell Codman of Boston. These verses are interesting from the
fact that they give the names of many of the _belles_ and _beaux_ of
that time:

I meant, my dear Fanny, to give you a call
And tell you the news of the Douglases ball;
But the weather's so bad,--I've a cold in my head,--
And I daren't venture out; so I send you instead
A poetic epistle--for plain humble prose
Is not worthy the joys of this ball to disclose.
To begin with our entrance, we came in at nine,
The two rooms below were prodigiously fine,
And the _coup d'oeil_ was shewy and brilliant 'tis true,
Pretty faces not wanting, some old and some new.
But, oh! my dear cousin, no words can describe
T