Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 1White, Andrew Dickson
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Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 1
White, Andrew Dickson
Cornell University; Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; White, Andrew Dickson, 1832-1918
Through his personal history, as I then began to learn
it, ran a thread, or rather a strong cord, of stoicism.
He had clung with such desperate tenacity to his faith in
the future of the telegraphic system, that, sooner than part
with his interest in it, even when its stock was utterly
discredited, he suffered from poverty, and almost from want.
While pressing on his telegraphic construction, he had been
terribly wounded in a Western railroad accident, but had
extricated himself from the dead and dying, and, as I
learned from others, had borne his sufferings without a
murmur. At another time, overtaken by ship-fever at
Montreal, and thought to be beyond help, he had quietly
made up his mind that, if he could reach a certain hydropathic
establishment in New York, he would recover; and
had dragged himself through that long journey, desperately
ill as he was, in railway cars, steamers, and
stages, until he reached his desired haven; and there he
finally recovered, though nearly every other person
attacked by the disease at his Montreal hotel had died.
Pursuing his telegraphic enterprise, he had been obliged
at times to fight many strong men and great combinations
of capital; but this same stoicism carried him through:
he used to say laughingly that his way was to ``tire them
out.''
When, at last, fortune had begun to smile upon him, his
public spirit began to show itself in more striking forms,
though not in forms more real, than in his earlier days.
Evidences of this met the eye of his visitors at once, and
among these were the fine cattle, sheep, fruit-trees, and
the like, which he had brought back from the London
Exposition of 1851. His observations of the agricultural
experiments of Lawes and Gilbert at Rothamstead in
England, and his visits to various agricultural exhibitions,
led him to attempt similar work at home. Everything
that could improve the community in which he lived
was matter of concern to him. He took the lead in
establishing ``Cascadilla Place,'' in order to give a very
gifted woman an opportunity to show her abilities in
administering hydropathic treatment to disease; his
public library, when I first visited Ithaca, was just
completed.
He never showed the slightest approach to display or
vanity regarding any of these things, and most of them I
heard of first, at a later period, from others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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