My visit to Europe also gave me my first great treat in music.  The Handel Anniversary was then being celebrated at the Crystal Palace in London, and I had never up to that time, nor have I often since, felt the power and majesty of music in such high degree.  What I heard at the Crystal Palace and what I subsequently heard on the Continent in the cathedrals, and at the opera, certainly enlarged my appreciation of music.  At Rome the Pope’s choir and the celebrations in the churches at Christmas and Easter furnished, as it were, a grand climax to the whole.

These visits to Europe were also of great service in a commercial sense.  One has to get out of the swirl of the great Republic to form a just estimate of the velocity with which it spins.  I felt that a manufacturing concern like ours could scarcely develop fast enough for the wants of the American people, but abroad nothing seemed to be going forward.  If we excepted a few of the capitals of Europe, everything on the Continent seemed to be almost at a standstill, while the Republic represented throughout its entire extent such a scene as there must have been at the Tower of Babel, as pictured in the story-books—­hundreds rushing to and fro, each more active than his neighbor, and all engaged in constructing the mighty edifice.

It was Cousin “Dod” (Mr. George Lauder) to whom we were indebted for a new development in our mill operations—­the first of its kind in America.  He it was who took our Mr. Coleman to Wigan in England and explained the process of washing and coking the dross from coal mines.  Mr. Coleman had constantly been telling us how grand it would be to utilize what was then being thrown away at our mines, and was indeed an expense to dispose of.  Our Cousin “Dod” was a mechanical engineer, educated under Lord Kelvin at Glasgow University, and as he corroborated all that Mr. Coleman stated, in December, 1871, I undertook to advance the capital to build works along the line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.  Contracts for ten years were made with the leading coal companies for their dross and with the railway companies for transportation, and Mr. Lauder, who came to Pittsburgh and superintended the whole operation for years, began the construction of the first coal-washing machinery in America.  He made a success of it—­he never failed to do that in any mining or mechanical operation he undertook—­and he soon cleared the cost of the works.  No wonder that at a later date my partners desired to embrace the coke works in our general firm and thus capture not only these, but Lauder also.  “Dod” had won his spurs.

[Illustration:  GEORGE LAUDER]

The ovens were extended from time to time until we had five hundred of them, washing nearly fifteen hundred tons of coal daily.  I confess I never pass these coal ovens at Larimer’s Station without feeling that if he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before is a public benefactor and lays the race under obligation, those who produce superior coke from material that has been for all previous years thrown over the bank as worthless, have great cause for self-congratulation.  It is fine to make something out of nothing; it is also something to be the first firm to do this upon our continent.