[Illustration: Home of George Francis Train from 1863 to 1869, No. 156 Madison Avenue, New York.] I had offered an interest in the road to old and well-established merchants of New York and other cities--the Grays, the Goodhues, the Aspinwalls, the Howlands, the Grinnells, the Marshalls, and Davis, Brooks & Company; and even to some of the new men, like Henry Clews--agreeing to put them in "on the ground floor," if I may use an expression from the lesser world of finance. But they were afraid. It was too big. Only two of them, William H. Macy and William H. Guion, would take any stock. There was a meeting of the stockholders in Gibson's office in Wall Street, for the purpose of electing a board of directors. By this time the importance of the road had become recognized, and there was an active desire on the part of the chiefs of the trunk lines leading to the West to obtain control of the charter. They had their representatives there, and I saw from the first that an attempt would be made to capture the Union Pacific Railway as a trophy of one of these powerful Eastern lines. Fortunately, as I perfectly well knew, they were not quite powerful enough, in the circumstance, even with a united front, to accomplish their purposes. William B. Ogden was in the chair, and a hasty calculation convinced me that probably $200,000,000 were represented by the men gathered in the little office. Of the great trunk lines represented I can recall now the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the New York Central. It was from the forces of the last that the lightning came. As soon as the meeting had been called to order, and the purpose of it stated by the chair, a gentleman arose and began speaking in a wheezy, squeaky voice. But he had a way of saying what he wanted, and of saying it shrewdly, adroitly, and very effectively. I could see that he was accustomed to win in the Shakespearian way--"by indirections find directions out." He said that as everything was ready for the election of a board, he would suggest that the chair should appoint a committee of five which should then name a board of thirty members. I saw that this was an adroit move to put one of these big roads in control of the committee and, of course, in control of the Union Pacific. The chair immediately named five men, three of whom were representatives of the New York Central. I turned to a gentleman sitting next me and asked who was the wheezy-voiced man who had just taken his seat. "That is Samuel J. Tilden," said he.