Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/72

 morrow. From this time, there could be never a day of freedom from the intensest strain of business anxiety. He had chosen speculation for a life work, and its cares must sit upon him. His could not be the experience of the man in mercantile life, or of the man of smaller affairs, who finishes his work in the evening and goes to his home with never a thought of the cares to-morrow will bring. Great enterprises make great responsibilities. From this time the enormous weight of the responsibilities upon Jay Gould's shoulders could never again lessen.

Did he ever, in those years of scheming and fighting for wealth, cast his recollection backward to the old days at Roxbury, when he was but a barefoot farmer's boy, with nothing more oppressive on his mind than the necessity to go through the rain for the cows, or to find the nest that the blue hen had hidden away some place in the hay-mow?

There was little in the associations that he made during these first Wall street years to remind him of those days. For while many of the men with whom he came in contact had been like himself, the sons of farmers with the first years of their lives spent far from the city, yet from this time, all their "watering" of stock was entirely in the direction of stocks which represented the value of railroads and other properties, and all their knowledge of farm products was devoted to the manipulation of grain markets.

As Gould's acquaintance grew larger, and his success in ordinary small ventures became assured, his disposition began to demand something of