Fifty years have now passed away since the young school-teacher landed in New York, and he stands to-day at the head of the mercantile interests of the New World.  In the half-century which has elapsed since then, he has won a fortune which is variously estimated at from twenty-five to forty millions of dollars.  He has gained all this wealth fairly, not by trickery and deceit, or even by a questionable honesty, but by a series of mercantile transactions the minutest of which bears the impress of his sterling integrity, and by a patience, energy, tact, and genius of which few men are possessed.  Surely, then, it must be a proud thought to him that he has done all this himself, by his own unaided efforts, and that amid all his wonderful success there does not rest one single stain upon his good name as a man or a merchant.

It is said that Mr. Stewart regards himself as a “lucky man,” rather than as one who has risen by the force of his own genius.  A writer in the New York Herald relates the following incident, as illustrative of the superstition which this feeling of “luck” has given rise to with him:  “When he kept his store on Broadway, between Murray and Warren Streets, there sat on the sidewalk before it, on an orange box, an old woman, whose ostensible occupation was the selling of apples.  This business was, however, merely a pretense; the main object being beggary.  As years rolled on, Mr. Stewart became impressed with the idea that the old dame was his guardian angel of good luck, and this impression took so firm a hold upon his mind that when he removed to Chambers Street, he, in person, took up the old woman’s box, and removed her to the front of his new establishment.  In further illustration of Mr. Stewart’s faith in the Irish traditional belief in ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’ persons, it may be mentioned that, after the completion of the St. Nicholas Hotel in this city, an undertaking in which he was largely interested, and when the building was just about to be opened for the reception of guests, the millionaire, standing in the drawing-room, ejaculated, ’It is now finished; I hope its first visitors may be lucky people.’

“A gentleman present, who had heard of Mr. Stewart’s care for the aged apple vendor, remarked, ’I presume, sir, you do not in reality care about lucky or unlucky persons;’ to which he immediately replied, ’Indeed, I do.  There are persons who are unlucky.  I sometimes open a case of goods, and sell the first from it to some person who is unlucky, and lose on it to the end.  I frequently see persons to whom I would not sell if I could avoid it.’”

The first incident, if true, doubtless illustrates the quiet kindness with which Mr. Stewart watches over the poor that he takes under his care—­and they are many.  He has won his success too fairly to be a believer in mere luck.  There is no such thing as chance in this world.  Men are the architects of their own fortunes.