If the reader, knowing something of the strange career of
Harden-Hickey, wonders why one writes of him appreciatively
rather than in amusement, he is asked not to judge Harden-Hickey
as one judges a contemporary.

Harden-Hickey, in our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the
American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of
the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the
Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of
comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur
"statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the
vacant mind of the village idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to
Falling Water also was a joke. The people of our day had not the
time to understand Harden-Hickey; they thought him a charlatan,
half a dangerous adventurer and half a fool; and Harden-Hickey
certainly did not under stand them. His last words, addressed to his
wife, showed this. They were: "I would rather die a gentleman than
live a blackguard like your father."

As a matter of fact, his father-in-law, although living under the
disadvantage of being a Standard Oil magnate, neither was, nor is,
a blackguard, and his son-in-law had been treated by him
generously and with patience. But for the duellist and soldier of
fortune it was impossible to sympathize with a man who took no
greater risk in life than to ride on one of his own railroads, and of
the views the two men held of each other, that of John H. Flagler
was probably the fairer and the more kindly.

Harden-Hickey was one of the most picturesque, gallant, and