Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/45

 life was to "get on." With every passing year his ambition broadened, until it enveloped a continent.

It is a striking coincidence that young Gould and his two partners in the map business were sued by the man who first employed the former in the project, and they placed their case in the hands of Lawyer T. R. Westbrook, who succeeded in having the suit dismissed. Westbrook afterward became (and this is the coincidence) the supreme court judge, who years after scandalized the legal profession by holding court in Jay Gould's private office and issuing an order in one of the Manhattan railway litigations.

He and his cousin, with whom he entered into partnership at Albany, increased the map business to the extent of sending surveyors into various portions of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, but afterward the contracts were transferred to a surveyor in Philadelphia.

From this time he was continuously employed as a surveyor, until a severe attack of typhoid fever compelled him to give up outdoor exposure. He had determined to make a complete survey of the entire state of New York, and he did complete maps of Albany county, the village of Cohoes, the Albany and Niscayuna Plank road and Delaware county. He also surveyed Lake and Geauga counties in Ohio, Oakland county in Michigan, and a proposed railroad from Newburg to Syracuse. Then he was seriously ill for several months, but his money was not used up, and he wrote with some