“There were many distinct characteristics about Mr. Gould,” said Mr. Dillon. “I never knew him to utter a profane word, and he was as delicate and sensitive in temperament as a woman. Mr. Gould wrote and spoke capital English, but he never wrote a word that was not necessary. Judge Usher, who was Secretary of the Interior under Lincoln, an able and great lawyer, once said to me that he had bought a railroad for Mr. Gould, or in his interest, and had written out a contract covering two or three pages of foolscap. The judge, in telling of the incident, said: ‘I sent the contract, which I considered a thorough document, to Mr. Gould, and he almost immediately returned it written out on a half page of paper of the same size. When I got the document and found it perfect in its condensed form, I felt ashamed of myself.’ Mr. Gould was so self-reliant that he had little use for lawyers. He was his own negotiator and contract maker. When he bought the Iron Mountain road he showed me, the next day, a contract for that great purchase. It was a contract written out in his own handwriting on less than two pages of social note paper. “He concluded the contract of the purchase of the Missouri Pacific without consulting his lawyers. When shown the contract the next day, his counsel told him he had bought a big lawsuit, and that title to the whole property was in question in the Supreme Court of the United States. He simply said, ‘I have given my check for $3,700,000, and the thing is closed. The seller would laugh at me if I went back and expressed a desire to rescind.’ He thereupon directed his attorneys to take charge of the case and try to sustain the title of the property bought, which after years of litigation they did. “But great as Mr. Gould was as a financier and railway manager, he would, if bred to the bar, have made a greater lawyer. That is a fact. I have seen him greatly provoked, but never saw him lose his temper or utter a threat. Nevertheless, he had a good memory, both for benefits received and injuries done. He was probably, in the language of Dr. Johnson, ‘a good hater without loquacity and pomposity.’” A popular error about Jay Gould is the notion that he was invincible. In 1866 a promissory note for $500 with his name went a-begging round Wall street at a heavy discount, yet he left a fortune estimated at $100,000,000. If Gould had died poor, what would have been the general verdict on his career? And yet, only eight years ago he was on the verge of failure. This was after the panic of May, 1884, one of the few times that he was tempted into the stock market as a speculator in order to hold up the price of stocks with which he was burdened.