paths. I tell you I've got an ore ship coming in and our mills are waiting for her." He rubbed his hands with satisfaction—"I'd not miss seeing her come in for all the wood paths in Christendom." He was then getting $120 to $130 a ton for Bessemer steel rails, and if his mill stopped a minute waiting for ore, he felt that he was missing his life's chance.
Perhaps it was this same man who often gazed out into the lake with every nerve stretched to try to see an ore ship approaching. One day one of his friends asked him if he could see the boat.
"No-o, no-o," he reluctantly admitted, "but she's most in sight."
This ore trade was of great and absorbing interest at Cleveland. My old employer was paid $4 a ton for carrying ore from the Marquette regions fifty years ago, and to think of the wickedness of this maker of woodland paths, who in later years was moving the ore in great ships for eighty cents a ton and making a fortune at it.