Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/67

Rh in good stead in after years. Pittsburgh had a lifelong fascination for him. Up to his death he watched the progress of the steel industry.

These travels, profitable to the shrewd investor that he was from a business standpoint, broadened his ideas and outlook, and gave him an appetite for travel that led to the European trip he had long looked forward to. Leaving in May, 1841, on the Great Western, whose voyage was 13 days, 9 hours to Clifton.

From a well-written diary of his travels, kept by Williamson, probably only for his own eyes to refresh his memory in after years, much is discovered of the man himself, his sorrow in leaving friends, his enjoyment of his companions making the same "Grand Tour," his sympathetic nature, humor, and tireless energy to make the most of time and opportunity, his farseeing shrewdness in observations recorded of people, places and customs. The intensely human side of him is revealed in contradistinction to "the money bag man" that some people took him for. There are a hundred and thirty-four pages of twenty-four lines and about three hundred