When Vail said auf wiedersehen to the telephone business, it had passed from infancy to childhood. It was well shaped but not fully grown. Its pioneering days were over. It was self-supporting and had a little money in the bank. But it could not then have carried the load of traffic that it carries to-day. It had still too many problems to solve and too much general inertia to overcome. It needed to be conserved, drilled, educated, popularized. And the man who was finally chosen to replace Vail was in many respects the appropriate leader for such a preparatory period. Hudson--John Elbridge Hudson--was the name of the new head of the telephone people. He was a man of middle age, born in Lynn and bred in Boston; a long-pedigreed New Englander, whose ancestors had smelted iron ore in Lynn when Charles the First was King. He was a lawyer by profession and a university professor by temperament. His specialty, as a man of affairs, had been marine law; and his hobby was the collection of rare books and old English engravings. He was a master of the Greek language, and very fond of using it. On all possible occasions he used the language of Pericles in his conversation; and even carried this preference so far as to write his business memoranda in Greek. He was above all else a scholar, then a lawyer, and somewhat incidentally the central figure in the telephone world. But it was of tremendous value to the telephone business at that time to have at its head a man of Hudson's intellectual and moral calibre. He gave it tone and prestige. He built up its credit. He kept it clean and clear above all suspicion of wrong-doing. He held fast whatever had been gained. And he prepared the way for the period of expansion by borrowing fifty millions for improvements, and by adding greatly to the strength and influence of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Hudson remained at the head of the telephone table until his death, in 1900, and thus lived to see the dawn of the era of big business. Under his regime great things were done in the development of the art. The business was pushed ahead at every point by its captains. Every man in his place, trying to give a little better service than yesterday--that was the keynote of the Hudson period. There was no one preeminent genius. Each important step forward was the result of the cooperation of many minds, and the prodding necessities of a growing traffic.