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When Fessenden Abbott heard that he was to inherit four hundred millions of dollars he experienced the profoundest discouragement he was ever to know, except on that midnight ten years later when he stood on a moonlit balcony in Hungary, alone with the daughter of an Emperor, and opened his contemptuous American mind to the deeper problems of Europe.
His ambition had been immeasurable, yet almost defined. His hopes had been the confident imperious extravagances of a youth in whom narrow circumstances and a high indomitable spirit had developed that ardent personal force which equips man to conquer life. His ideals had soared in stellar spaces -- ideals created by passionate brooding on the careers of Washington, Hamilton, Napoleon, Nelson, Cromwell, Kossuth, the great Hunyadis, Alexander, Cesar, Rudolph the First of Austria. How he had pored over the lives of this catholic assortment of heroes while his fingers froze and the winds roared through the Adirondack wilderness; on hot summer afternoons as he trudged behind his plough, the reins wound about one arm, his book in the bend of the other, vaguely wondering sometimes why his manifest delinquencies were never noticed.