Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/174

150 instantly responsive to a good story, or led him often to express himself in a droll or unexpected way. When he was wheeled into the directors' meetings of the big corporations he would call out: "A clear track for the through express!" Mr. Helmbold says that in the frequent visits to the vaults of the safe department of a trust company, where he kept his securities, he would exclaim to the clerks in charge, as he was slowly wheeled in:

"Make way, make way! Here I come with my usual impetuosity!" And there was a pathetic touch in his humorous remarks to H. C. Townsend toward the end of his life, when they met one day in the office of the Cambria Iron Company. Isaiah Williamson had in his hand a check for $100,000, and when Mr. Townsend rallied him on its size, he asked:

"Do you want to earn that check?"

"I'm your man!"

"Make me a young man again!"

As to the eccentric way in which he protested at what he deemed extortion in the suburban hotel, there is another side to that story, which the papers did not get hold of. While he refused to use the hotel's