A MILLIONAIRE'S HISTORY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1180, 29 November 1883, Page 3

A MILLIONAIRE'S HISTORY.

Mr J. Gould, who has just been examined by the United States Committee on Labour and Education, gave them an interesting account of his early life and of the origin of his enormous fortune. His father was a small farmer, and the future millionaire, who possessed neither shoes nor stockings at the time, minded the cows. At the age of 14 he exchanged his occupation for the more congenial one of keeping books for a blacksmith, who gave him no other remuneration than his board. He managed to attend a night school, where he picked up some mathematics and some notions of engineering, for which he had a marked taste. He used to rise at three in the morning, and worked at his favorite study till six. He next got a place as assistant in a county store at 20 dol a month, and sometime after he left the store for a desk in a surveyor's office. His employer,having failed, his clerk. started in business on his own account; and the first money he earned

was a dollar which a farmer gave him for a noon nrrlc to tell the time by. He executed st-veral local maps in the course of that summer, and sold the copvright of them for 500 dol. In the next year he made similar maps of Albany and Delaware, and realised by their sale the considerable sum of 5000 dol. This sufficed to purchase a share in a large tannery, of which he eventually became sole proprietor, and which he then sold, realising a handsome profit on the transaction. The panic of 1857 occuring at this period in his career, the Rutland and Washington railroad was offering its first mortgage bonds at 10c to the dollar. Mr Gould bought them all, principally on credit, and thus became the owner of a line of railway sixty miles long. Having successfully developed the busiaess of the road, it soon began to pay dividends, and he was able to sell out at an immense profit. The Cleveland and Pittsburgh and the Union Pacific were his next ventures. He fared equally well with them ; and from that time to the present his career has been one of almost uniform and unbroken success.— St. Jame's Gazette.