Well, Mr. Blaine had for eight years been in various business transactions with Mr. Fisher, in which he says Mr. Fisher treated him very handsomely. Now, he was thankful to Mr. Fisher for his “generous” offer to admit him (the Speaker) “to a participation in the new railroad enterprise”—that railroad being a land-grant road. The “terms” offered by Mr. Fisher, whatever they may have been, pleased Speaker Blaine greatly. But he wanted more. He wished very much that Mr. Caldwell, the business friend of Mr. Fisher, should “dispose of a share of his interest” to him (the Speaker), and that without much delay. And he desired Mr. Caldwell as well as Mr. Fisher to understand that he (Speaker Blaine) would not prove a deadhead in the enterprise if he once embarked in it, and that he saw various channels in which he knew he could make himself useful.
But Mr. Caldwell seems to have been a little hard of hearing in this respect. He may have thought that Mr. Blaine was neither a practical railroad man to help in building a road, nor as useful a financier as a practical banker or Wall Street man would have been in raising funds. He seems to have feared that Mr. Blaine might turn out a deadhead in the enterprise after all, and that his “usefulness in various channels” would not amount to much. And so for three months Mr. Blaine waited in vain for that “definite proposition” from Mr. Caldwell which he had so urgently asked for.
Mr. Blaine then evidently grew impatient at Mr. Caldwell's obtuseness, and wrote two more letters calculated to quicken his intelligence. The first was as follows:
Personal.
My dear Sir: I spoke to you a short time ago about a point of interest to your railroad company that occurred at the last session of Congress.
