A Captain of Industry

Excerpt it; and since he no longer had his way with absolute regularity, his temper was not so sweet as before.

It is of importance to explain this, because our friend was much in the papers in those days, and secured a great deal of notoriety through an unfortunate exhibition of ill temper. It happened at a time when he had been for over ten years the new man we have pictured, and had supplanted his father as the president of a large and important manufacturing concern. The reader will perhaps divine that I refer to the historic Hungerville Steel Mills, and to the occasion of the great Hungerville strike that once shook the country.

VIII

The Hungerville Mills Company was one of the creations of the financial genius of van Rensselaer senior; the mills had existed before, but they had been run by several rival companies, which were always at war with each other, with the consequence that their stock was a by-word among men. But one day a rumor went flying through Wall Street, and then the sto