302 WORKMEN AND HEROES failed in business ; and this is the more remarkable, since in the course of his business life the country passed through no less than ten serious commercial panics. Peter Cooper and Miss Bedel were married on December 22, 1813, when he was twenty-two and the lady twenty-one. Their married life, as it was excep- tionally long, so it was exceptionally happy. It lasted fifty-six years ; Mrs. Cooper died in 1869, and Mr. Cooper survived her fourteen years, dying in 1883. Their golden wedding was celebrated in 1863. They had six children, but only two lived to grow up ; the Hon. Edward Cooper, once mayor of the city, and Sarah Amelia Cooper, the wife of the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt. Mr. James Parton says : "There never was a happier marriage than this. To old age Mr Cooper never sat near his wife without holding her hand in his. He never spoke to her, nor of her, without some tender epithet. He attributed the great oappiness of his life and most of his success to her admirable qualities. She sec- onded every good impulse of his benevolence, and made the fulfilment of his great scheme possible by her wise and resolute economy." Mr. Cooper seems to have inherited something of his father's business rest- lessness, for in addition to the many pursuits in which we have seen him engage, he now bought a grocery stand, and in about a year gave that up and purchased a glue factory, selling his grocery business and buying a lease of the glue factory for twenty-one years, for $2,000, his whole savings. He differed from his father in this, that everything prospered with which he had to do. The grocery had done well, but the glue factory did better. " At that time nearly all the glue used in this country was imported from Ireland, and sold at a high price. Mr. Cooper studied the subject and experimented, until he was able to make better glue than the Irish and sell it at a lower price, and he soon had nearly the entire glue business of the country in his hands." But chance had nothing to do with Mr. Cooper's success: the secret of that success was unremitting industry and generous economy. He worked that he might earn, and he saved that he might use and give. For twenty years while he held the glue factory, he was his own bookkeeper, clerk, and salesman ; going to the factory at daybreak to light the fires, and spending the evenings at home, posting his books, writing, and read- ing to his family. In 1828, moved by the interest in business circles in the completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Mr. Cooper, with two partners, bought a tract of three thousand acres within the city limits of Baltimore. By the failure of his as- sociates to meet the payment of their shares, Mr. Cooper was obliged to shoulder the whole cost, amounting to $105,000. The road, too, owing to unexpected dif Acuities in construction, was dreading bankruptcy, from which it was saved by Mr. Cooper's ingenuity in devising a locomotive that enabled the company to overcome certain difficulties that had been thought .insurmountable. Failing in the end to sell his land as he had hoped, Mr. Cooper decided to utilize the timber growing on it in the manufacture of charcoal iron. When he had, after many difficulties, established his works, he sold out to some Boston capitalists, who
