Mrs. Storrs and Miss Edna Dean Proctor, who made her home with them, comprised his family, as his only daughter had married Miss Proctor’s brother and lived in Peoria, Illinois.  Mr. Storrs had made his own fortune, starting out by buying his “time” of his father and borrowing an old horse and pedlar’s cart from a friend.  He put into the cart a large assortment of Yankee notions, or what people then called “short goods,” as stockings, suspenders, gloves, shoestrings, thread and needles, tape, sewing silk, etc.  He determined to make his own fortune and succeeded royally for he became a “merchant prince.”  His was a rarely noble and generous nature with a heart as big as his brain.  Several of his large rooms downstairs were crammed with wonderfully beautiful and precious things which his soul delighted in picking up, in ivory, jade, bronze, and glass.  He was so devotedly fond of music that at great expense he had a large organ built which could be played by pedalling and pulling stops in and out, and sometimes on Sunday morning he would rise by half-past six, and be downstairs in his shirt sleeves hard at work, eliciting oratorio or opera music for his own delectation.  A self-made man, “who did not worship his creator.”  He was always singularly modest, although very decided in his opinions.  Men are asking of late who can be called educated.  Certainly not a student of the ancient Assyrian or the mysteries of the Yogi, or the Baha, or the Buddhistic legends, when life is so brief and we must “act in the living present.”  But a man who has studied life and human nature as well as the best form of books, gained breadth and culture by wide travel, and is always ready for new truths, that man is educated in the best sense, although entirely self-educated.  Greeley used to say, “Charles Storrs is a great man.”

Greeley used to just rest and enjoy himself at Mr. Storrs’s home, often two weeks at a time, and liked to shut himself into that wonderful library to work or read.  Once when he returned unexpectedly, the maid told Miss Proctor that Mr. Greeley had just come in from the rain and was quite wet, and there was no fire in the library.  He did not at first care to change to Mr. Storrs’s special den in the basement.  But Miss Proctor said “It is too cold here and your coat is quite wet.”  “Oh, I am used to that,” he said plaintively.  But his special desk was carried down to a room bright with an open fire, and he seemed glad to be cared for.

Whitelaw Reid was photographed with Greeley when he first came on from the West to take a good share of the responsibility of editing the Tribune.  He stood behind Greeley’s chair, and I noticed his hair was then worn quite long.  But he soon attained the New York cut as well as the New York cult.  Both Reid and John Hay were at that time frequent guests of Mr. Storrs, who never seemed weary of entertaining his friends.  Beecher was one of his intimate acquaintances and they often went to New York together hunting for rare treasures.