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Updated: May 13, 2025
"We hear odd things concerning Mr. Cowperwood out in Chicago. Some people say he is sound some not. He has some very good franchises covering a large portion of the city, but they are only twenty-year franchises, and they will all run out by 1903 at the latest.
I never had any civil life." I looked puzzled, and he added: "I come of a military family. I am an orphan, and I am an enfant de troupe." Now did you know that there were such things today as "Children of the Regiment"? I own I did not. Yet there he stood before me, a smiling twenty-year old corporal, who had been brought up by the regiment, been a soldier boy from his babyhood.
Gregory, but that was all. And yet, his suavity won for him many admirers. There were not a few who promised to give him their insurance if they concluded to "take any out." Only one man in town was willing to be insured, and he was too old to be comforting. Mr. Calligan was reputed to be one hundred and three years of age; and he wanted the twenty-year endowment plan.
"But, my dear general!" Doolittle found his native tongue rusty in his mouth, although the twenty-year expatriate, who had originally been of French descent, had used it with the ease of one who had never dropped it. "My dear general! Even as a lieutenant colonel, the social advantages open to a man of such wealth are boundless absolutely boundless, sir!
Sometimes, after listening to a sustained invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject known as military "courtesy," he suspected that the dim purpose of the war was to let the regular army officers men with the mentality and aspirations of schoolboys have their fling with some real slaughter. He was being grotesquely sacrificed to the twenty-year patience of a Hopkins!
He was not at all satisfied with the thought of obtaining a beggarly twenty-year extension for his giant schemes when cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Pittsburg were apparently glad to grant their corporations franchises which would not expire for ninety-nine years at the earliest, and in most cases were given in perpetuity.
"Well, in this instance the old man had overreached himself, and finding it necessary to increase his working capital, he incorporated his holdings into the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company and floated a bond-issue of a million dollars. They were twenty-year six per cent. certificates; the security was ample, and I invested for you three hundred thousand dollars in Cardigan bonds.
Lucas, the great money houses of the East are interested in this local contest here in Chicago. For example, Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co. would like to see a consolidation of all the lines on a basis that will make them an attractive investment for buyers generally and will at the same time be fair and right to the city. A twenty-year contract is much too short a term in their eyes.
And he would gaze at his acre of ground, bare, ploughed-up clay, without a tree or a blade of grass, and he found no trouble in transforming it mentally into an eden of "plants, fragrance and shrubbery." He planned to fill it with twenty-year magnolias, sixteen-year lindens, twelve-year poplars, birches and grape vines which would yield him fine white grapes the very next year.
So saying the President led the way to the Council-chamber, and there, after the Ariel as it had already been decided to name the first air-ship had been christened in anticipation in twenty-year old champagne, the Circle settled down at once to business, and for a good three hours discussed the engineer's estimate and plans for building the first vessel of the aërial fleet.
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