I recall one team of young horses which were driven to frenzy; their owner was unable to control them, but he kept them on the road while they ran away with a wild dash over the hills. In telling this story, as illustrating how recent is railway development in the United States, at a dinner abroad, I stated that as far as I knew and believed, those horses were so frightened that they could not be stopped and were still running. A very successful and serious-minded captain of industry among the guests sternly rebuked me by saying: "Sir, that is impossible; horses were never born that could run for twenty-five years without stopping." American exaggeration was not so well known among our friends on the other side then as it is now. As we boys of the village were gathered on the banks of the Hudson cheering our favorite steamers, or watching with eager interest the movements of the trains, a frequent discussion would be about our ambitions in life. Every young fellow would state a dream which he hoped but never expected to be realized. I was charged by my companions with having the greatest imagination and with painting more pictures in the skies than any of them. This was because I stated that in politics, for I was a great admirer of William H. Seward, then senator from New York, I expected to be a United States senator, and in business, because then the largest figure in the business world was Commodore Vanderbilt, I hoped to become president of the Hudson River Railroad. It is one of the strangest incidents of what seemed the wild imaginings of a village boy that in the course of long years both these expectations were realized. When I entered the service of the railroad on the first of January, 1866, the Vanderbilt system consisted of the Hudson River and Harlem Railroads, the Harlem ending at Chatham, 128 miles, and the Hudson River at Albany, 140 miles long. The Vanderbilt system now covers 20,000 miles. The total railway mileage of the whole United States at that time was 36,000, and now it is 261,000 miles. My connection with the New York Central Railroad covers practically the whole period of railway construction, expansion, and development in the United States. It is a singular evidence of the rapidity of our country's growth and of the way which that growth has steadily followed the rails, that all this development of States, of villages growing into cities, of scattered communities becoming great manufacturing centres, of an internal commerce reaching proportions where it has greater volume than the foreign interchanges of the whole world, has come about during a period covered by the official career of a railroad man who is still in the service: an attorney in 1866, a vice-president in 1882, president in 1885, chairman of the board of directors in 1899, and still holds that office.