VALUABLE SERVICES.

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nature of difficulties to be overcome and the dangers to be avoided, which enabled him to exercise a potent and guiding influence with associates who had come into the business at later stages of its history. He was emphatically, and in every sense of the term, one of the pioneers of the telegraph enterprise, and no other person contributed more valuable service toward securing its early and successful establishment. He was present at the birth of the infant as a practical business project; he helped to give it vitality and strength in the days of its weakness; and he had the great satisfaction of witnessing its extraordinary growth and development to the proportions of a veritable giant. From the beginning of active operations his faith was absolutely unwavering in the ultimate and complete success of the telegraph as a profitable enterprise, and he realized very substantial compensation as the result of his early and correct judgment.

For more than fifteen years Mr. Cornell was the largest individual stockholder of the Western Union Telegraph Company, and in addition to his interests in that company, he was a large stockholder in the Illinois & Mississippi Telegraph Company and also in the Northwestern Telegraph Company. These organizations for many years occupied most of the territory west

and north of Chicago and St. Louis, and were conducted on terms of amity and co-operation with the Western Union system, but were at last absorbed by the greater company under permanent leases, and their lines now constitute a portion of the property of the Western Union Company. From the commencement of his career in the telegraph enterprise, Mr. Cornell demonstrated his faith in its complete success by investing every dollar of his earnings in the business, and steadfastly declined to part with his holdings of telegraph stocks, until his plans for the building up of the great University at Ithaca, rendered such a course necessary to provide means therefor.

The wisdom of his policy was abundantly vindicated by the fact that he was enabled to realize for his telegraph interests in the aggregate probably more than two millions of dollars. He was not possessed of any considerable amount of capital at the beginning of his operations, and this large accumulation was the result simply of the investment in telegraph property of earnings and profits realized from the construction of lines. It is a remarkable fact that Mr. Cornell thus gained from the fruits of his labors in the telegraph enterprise, a sum larger than all of the owners of the original patents of the telegraph realized for themselves from their entire interests. It is also true

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that nearly all of those who accumulated large fortunes from the profits of the telegraph development, were men who engaged in the business without much capital, or other advantage than their superior perception in anticipating the results which were to be attained in the business.

CHAPTER X.

AGRICULTURAL TASTES.

Rural Tendencies.-Resuming Agricultural Pursuits.-Improved Breeds of Animals.-The Forest Park Herd.-Farmers' Club. -Agricultural Societies.-President of State Society.-Delegate to London Exposition. -European Travel.—State Fair. -Embarrassments of the Agricultural College.-Proposition to Endow an Institution for Agricultural Education.-Donating a Farm.-Neglected Facilities.

ALTHOUGH reared on a farm from his eighth year, the rugged hills of De Ruyter did not offer sufficient attractions to induce the youth, Ezra Cornell, to choose the farmer's life as his vocation. Whether, if his lot had been cast in a more attractive agricultural region, he would as readily have forsaken the farm to enter upon the laborious occupation of a carpenter, cannot be stated with any satisfactory assurance. Affectionately attached to his parents and family, every influence of consanguinity would seem to have been favorable to his remaining at home. Perhaps the natural ambition of youth, which too often assists in the planning of "air castles," would have in

duced a change under any circumstances. Certain it is, however, that in all of his mature years, Mr. Cornell had an inextinguishable longing for farm life, and whenever other duties permitted him to follow the bent of his own real pleasure he was drawn irresistibly to rural affairs. In selecting a homestead after his marriage, instead of choosing an ordinary village lot convenient to business, he went outside the village and secured a plot of several acres, upon which he built his home. Here he spent much of his leisure time in the planting and cultivation of fruit, and within a few years possessed the choicest orchard to be found in the whole region about. He was a close observer, and speedily became an accomplished pomologist and an excellent authority on the character and habits of insects injurious to the orchard.

Agricultural periodicals and publications relating to farming, fruit culture, and stock raising were ever favorite reading for him, and he was a frequent contributor to many of the leading journals on all of these subjects. He was especially interested in improved methods of cultivation, the introduction of labor-saving implements and machinery, and in the improvement of the breeds of domestic animals. He was one of the original founders of the Tompkins County Agricultural