the tedious negotiation which usually preceded an exchange of commodities.  It was in this kind of traffic, doubtless, that our young German acquired that unconquerable propensity for making hard bargains, which was so marked a feature in his character as a merchant.  He could never rise superior to this early-acquired habit.  He never knew what it was to exchange places with the opposite party, and survey a transaction from his point of view.  He exulted not in compensating liberal service liberally.  In all transactions he kept in view the simple object of giving the least and getting the most.

Meanwhile his brother Henry was flourishing.  He married the beautiful daughter of a brother butcher, and the young wife, according to the fashion of the time, disdained not to assist her husband even in the slaughter-house as well as in the market-place.  Colonel Devoe, in his well-known Market Book, informs us that Henry Astor was exceedingly proud of his pretty wife, often bringing her home presents of gay dresses and ribbons, and speaking of her as “de pink of de Bowery.”  The butchers of that day complained bitterly of him, because he used to ride out of town fifteen or twenty miles, and buy up the droves of cattle coming to the city, which he would drive in and sell at an advanced price to the less enterprising butchers.  He gained a fortune by his business, which would have been thought immense, if the colossal wealth of his brother had not reduced all other estates to comparative insignificance.  It was he who bought, for eight hundred dollars, the acre of ground on part of which the old Bowery Theatre now stands.

John Jacob Astor remained not long in the employment of Robert Bowne.  It was a peculiarity of the business of a furrier at that day, that, while it admitted of unlimited extension, it could be begun on the smallest scale, with a very insignificant capital.  Every farmer’s boy in the vicinity of New York had occasionally a skin to sell, and bears abounded in the Catskill Mountains.  Indeed the time had not long gone by when beaver skins formed part of the currency of the-city.  All Northern and Western New York was still a fur-yielding country.  Even Long Island furnished its quota.  So that, while the fur business was one that rewarded the enterprise of great and wealthy companies, employing thousands of men and fleets of ships, it afforded an opening to young Astor, who, with the assistance of his brother, could command a capital of only a very few hundred dollars.  In a little shop in Water Street, with a back-room, a yard, and a shed, the shop furnished with only a few toys and trinkets, Astor began, business about the year 1786.  He had then, as always, the most unbounded confidence in his own abilities.  He used to relate that, at this time, a new row of houses in Broadway was the talk of the city from their magnitude and beauty.  Passing them one day, he said to himself:  “I’ll build some time or other a greater house than any of these, and in this very street.”  He used also to say, in his old age:  “The first hundred thousand dollars—­that was hard to get; but afterward it was easy to make more.”