Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/155

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AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY
119

how Jay Gould had arrived in New York, a penniless and ragged boy, with a mousetrap which he had invented, and how he had died, almost thirty years afterward, leaving a fortune of about $100,000,000. I told him how Commodore Vanderbilt had started life as a ferryman and had become America's greatest railroad "magnate"; how Rockefeller had begun his career sitting on a high stool in a Cleveland commission house, earning six dollars a week, and had created the greatest fortune that had ever been accumulated by a single man in the world's history. I told him how the Dodges had become our great " copper kings" and the Cranes our great manufacturers of iron pipe. Enver found these stories more thrilling than any that had ever come out of Bagdad, and I found afterward that he had retold them so frequently that they had reached almost all the important people in Constantinople.

Enver was immensely impressed also by what I said about the American institutions. He went through all the buildings and expressed his enthusiasm at everything he saw, and he even suggested that he would like to send his brother there. He took tea with Mrs. Gates, wife of President Gates, discussed most intelligently the courses, and asked if we could not introduce the study of agriculture. The teachers he met seemed to be a great revelation.

"I expected to find these missionaries as they are pictured in the Berlin newspapers," he said, "with long hair and hanging jaws, and hands clasped constantly in a prayerful attitude. But here is Dr. Gates, talking Turkish like a native and acting like a man of the world. I am more than pleased, and thank you for bringing me."