was his house, his financial transactions, his Wall Street
speculations, the rewards which he gave his friends assumed
heroic proportions. But these things all demanded money. The
dilapidated horse railways of New York offered him his most
convenient opportunity for amassing it.

But Whitney had not proceeded far when he came face to face with
a quiet and energetic young man who had already made considerable
progress in the New York transit field. This was a Virginian of
South Irish descent who had started life as a humble broker's
clerk twelve or fourteen years before. His name was Thomas
Fortune Ryan. Few men have wielded greater power in American
finance, but in 1884 Ryan was merely a ruddy-faced, cleancut, and
clean-living Irishman of thirty-three, who could be depended on
to execute quickly and faithfully orders on the New York Stock
Exchange--even though they were small ones--and who, in
unostentatious fashion, had already acquired much influence in
Tammany Hall. With his six feet of stature, his extremely slender
figure, his long legs, his long arms, his raiment--which always
represented the height of fashion and tended slightly toward the
flashy --Ryan made a conspicuous figure wherever he went. He was
born in 1851, on a small farm in Nelson County, Virginia. The
Civil War, which broke out when Ryan was a boy of ten, destroyed
the family fortune and in 1868, when seventeen, he began life as
a dry-goods clerk in Baltimore, fulfilling the tradition of the
successful country boy in the large city by marrying his
employer's daughter. When his father-in-law failed, in 1870, Ryan
came to New York, went to work in a broker's office, and
succeeded so well that, in a few years, he was able to purchase a
seat on the Stock Exchange. He was sufficiently skillful as a