JUDGE
stand why William Walker permits his daughters to marry those wandering railroad men.” They both became wealthy and Stearns reached the presidency of the New Jersey Central Railroad. Colket once told me this tale of Franklin B. Gowen, the wonderfully able lawyer who prosecuted the “Molly Maguires” to conviction, who devised the policy as president of the corporation which has since made the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company so prosperous, and who afterward shot himself in Washington:
“He was the quickest man to make a bargain ever I knew; one day I went to see him at the office of the company about some business. After it had been transacted he accompanied me to my carriage, which stood at the curb, and as I opened the door, he said: ‘By the bye, Colket, what will you take for the ——— tract?’ naming a tract of coal lands I owned. ‘I want for it a million one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,’ was my reply. ‘All right,’ said Gowen, ‘I will take it.’ The quickest man to make a bargain ever I met,” he concluded with an air which suggested that perhaps after all he might have secured more for the tract.
Judge F. Carroll Brewster gave a dinner to George S. Graham and myself, attended mainly by lawyers. The Penn Club, in whose organization I had participated, gave me a reception, and the students from the office of Peter McCall, then at the bar, gave me a dinner of recognition which was much appreciated.
After the lapse of a year John G. Johnson wrote in a published article: “The opinions he has delivered have been what those who knew him expected—learned, scholarly and logical…As a nisi prius judge, he has surprised his friends, by a display of unusually quick comprehension, sound judgment and practical common sense.”
The court held its sessions in Congress Hall, at the southeast corner of Sixth and Chestnut streets, and the judges sat upon the same platform on which Washington
