flock to his store to secure the great bargains which his advertisements offered them.  His terms were “cash,” and he had little difficulty in selling.  Purchasers found that they thus secured the best goods in the market at a lower figure than they had ever been offered before in New York, and each one was prompt to advise relatives and friends to avail themselves of the favorable opportunity.  Customers were plentiful; the little Broadway store was thronged all day, and long before the expiration of the period he had fixed for the duration of his sales, Mr. Stewart found his shelves empty and his treasury full.  He paid his note with a part of the money he had thus received, and with the rest laid in a fresh stock of goods.  He was fortunate in his purchases at this time, for, as the market was extremely dull and ready money scarce, he, by paying cash, bought his goods at very low prices.

The energy, industry, patience, and business tact displayed by Mr. Stewart during these first years of his commercial life brought him their sure reward, and in 1828, just six years after commencing business, he found his little store too small and humble for the large and fashionable trade which had come to him.  Three new stores had just been erected on Broadway, between Chambers and Warren Streets, and he leased the smallest of these and moved into it.  It was a modest building, only three stories high and but thirty feet deep, but it was a great improvement on his original place.  He was enabled to fill it with a larger and more attractive stock of goods, and his business was greatly benefited by the change.  He remained in this store for four years, and in 1832 removed to a two-story building located on Broadway, between Murray and Warren Streets.  Soon after occupying it, he was compelled, by the growth of his business, to add twenty feet to the depth of the store and a third story to the building.  A year or two later a fourth story was added, and in 1837 a fifth story, so rapidly did he prosper.

His trade was now with the wealthy and fashionable class of the city.  He had surmounted all his early difficulties, and laid the foundation of that splendid fortune which he has since won.  The majority of his customers were ladies, and he now resolved upon an expedient for increasing their number.  He had noticed that the ladies, in “shopping,” were given to the habit of gossiping, and even flirting with the clerks, and he adopted the expedient of employing as his salesmen the handsomest men he could procure, a practice which has since become common.  The plan was successful from the first.  Women came to his store in greater numbers than before, and “Stewart’s nice young men” were the talk of the town.

The great crisis of 1837 found Mr. Stewart a prosperous and rising man, and that terrible financial storm which wrecked so many of the best of the city firms did not so much as leave its mark on him.  Indeed, while other men were failing all around him, he was coining money.  It had always been his habit to watch the market closely, in order to profit by any sudden change in it, and his keen sagacity enabled him to see the approach of the storm long before it broke, and to prepare for it.