The combination of elements in his character was exceedingly rare. He was a great and perpetual dreamer, but his dreaming was of the solid and constructive sort. No day dreams nor woven rainbows were his, merely for entertainment of lazy hours. He pictured possibilities, not visionary vacuities. He had poetry in his being, but it was the poetry that was practical. He was a great poet and a great business prince combined. He was not unmindful of the formidableness of difficulty, but it inspired rather than deterred him. Underneath the ardor of the man was a solid substratum of calculation, and a calculation that took into account herculean effort. His penetration was sharp, quick and decisive. In this sweeping delineation the fact is not overlooked that Mr. DeBardeleben was forced to succumb to the inevitable when Birmingham fell a victim to the cholera scourge, and equally to the prostration occasioned by the memorable Black Friday in Wall street, the effects of which event fell with crashing weight on every interest throughout the Union. Furnaces grew cold, the pick in the mine lay idle, eager laborers sat holding their hands in idleness, and a nightmare fell on the nation throughout. To have known Birmingham in those days would have been to know a forlorn town, straggling and gloomy, while the environing districts were silent and smokeless. But the darkness gradually wore back to light. With the return of dawn, men were open-eyed for advantage in the great mineral domains of Alabama. Mr. DeBardeleben returned to Birmingham in 1877 with an immense fortune at his command, for he was the successor of Daniel Pratt. Now he became united with Colonel Sloss and Mr. T. H. Aldrich, names forever inseparable from the history of the mineral development of north Alabama, and an invincible trio it was. In the immense enterprises now entered on by the three, there was sufficient in the colossal proportions of the undertakings for the adjustment and adaptation of the peculiar gifts of all. Mr. DeBardeleben was the chief planner and sagacious seer of the group, and daring he was in all the enterprises proposed, but he was willing not alone to see, but to do. The expansive fields of ore constantly challenged his highest forces of enthusiasm and energy, and he chafed under his own limitations, as a man, to meet the challenge forthwith. Dreaming in the solid way already indicated, planning by day and night, and meanwhile always doing, Mr. DeBardeleben was a prodigious factor of development in this marvelous district.