vice-president, manager, or director of the companies. When the Steel Trust was formed, so the Courier said, he had joined it, with a holding of shares which guaranteed him an income of $12,000,000. But at the same time he had been chief shareholder and expert adviser of the Petroleum Combine, and in virtue of his holding had dominated three or four of the other Trust Companies. And at his death his fortune, reckoned in German currency, had amounted to a round thousand million marks.
Samuel, his only son, the offspring of that early marriage, contracted in defiance of public opinion, had been his sole heir—and the Courier, with its usual delicacy, interpolated a remark to the effect that there was something almost sad in the idea of any one, without himself contributing, and through no fault of his own, being born to such a situation. Samuel had inherited the palace on Fifth Avenue at New York, the country mansions, and all the shares, Trust bonds, and profits of his father; he inherited also the strange position to which his father had risen, his world-fame and the hatred directed by his out-distanced competitors against the power of his gold—all the hatred to allay which he yearly distributed his huge donations to colleges, conservatoires, libraries, benevolent institutions, and that University which his father had founded and which bore his name.
Samuel Spoelmann did not deserve the hatred of the out-distanced competitors; that the Courier was sure of. He had gone early into the business, and had controlled the bewildering possessions of his house all by himself during his father's last years. But everybody knew that his heart had never been really in the business. His real inclinations had been, strange to say, all along much more towards music and especially organ music—and the truth of this information on the part of the Courier was certain, for Mr. Spoelmann actually kept a small organ in the
