My methods of attending to business matters differed from those of
most well-conducted merchants of my time and allowed me more freedom.
Even after the chief affairs of the Standard Oil Company were moved to
New York, I spent most of my summers at our home in Cleveland, and I
do still. I would come to New York when my presence seemed necessary,
but for the most part I kept in touch with the business through our
own telegraph wires, and was left free to attend to many things which
interested me--among others, the making of paths, the planting of
trees, and the setting out of little forests of seedlings.

Of all the profitable things which develop quickly under the hand, I
have thought my young nurseries show the greatest yield. We keep a set
of account books for each place, and I was amazed not long ago at the
increase in value that a few years make in growing things, when we
came to remove some young trees from Westchester County to Lakewood,
New Jersey. We plant our young trees, especially evergreens, by the
thousand--I think we have put in as many as ten thousand at once, and
let them develop, to be used later in some of our planting schemes. If
we transfer young trees from Pocantico to our home in Lakewood, we
charge one place and credit the other for these trees at the market
rate. We are our own best customers, and we make a small fortune out
of ourselves by selling to our New Jersey place at $1.50 or $2.00
each, trees which originally cost us only five or ten cents at
Pocantico.

In nursery stock, as in other things, the advantage of doing things on
a large scale reveals itself. The pleasure and satisfaction of saving
and moving large trees--trees, say, from ten to twenty inches in
diameter, or even more in some cases--has been for years a source of