The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-03-03
UNHAPrg HETTY GREEN.
Mistress of FiBanee Least Contente.
 Woman ia New York.


 Mistress of Finance Least Contented
 Woman in New York.
 Broadway Magazine. ..s.
 If you have been a'paft of the hur- rying throng that daily 1ostles down lower Broadway you. may. have seen her Such >a lonely little figure! A withered Ieaf. 1t seems, strangely toss- ed in the great financial current. Fol- low thIs little old woman in the rusty black and see her enter the Chemical National Bank. She is not the scrub woman. The scrubwoman has no clothes of such ancient date as hers the alpaca gown that has weathered many seasons;. the black woolen cape that has shaped itself to the shoulders as they have bowed through the last ten years. and the tousled bonnet with it's little bunch of flowers that faded with the millinery of many summers past.
 Yet she has made no mistake in en- tering here, where the atmosphere is crisp with the. ways of the business world and metallic with the sound of money. For To! office boys and clerks and men higher up stand obsequious- ly aside as she enters. The bowed gray head turns neither to the right nor to the left as she walks straight on. With assurance her hands rests on the gate that leads inside beyond the brass barred windows of a mahog- any rollltop desk. This is her office.
 The shabby little old woman who has just passed from view is worth S60, 0,000. 0.000-even $100.oO0.000 some estimates say. She is Hetry Rowland Robinson Green, the greatest. mistress of finance the world has ever seen. Seated atop of her huge yellow mil- lions. wrinkled old woman, the flnan- cial limelight of a continent plays about her as she directs the destinies of men and of corporations. There is power in the penstroke of her aged fingers. the thin old fingers that are busy, busy all day long cutting cou- pons and signing checks. She has more ready money at her command than any other one individuaIi Wall street waits on her coffers. To the old-fashioned mahogany desk comes a procession of bank presidents. hat fn hand, railroad magnates lowing low, and rich directors humbly making obelsance. Even the city of New York in need has brought it's plea to her. It's richest citizeness. Cooly. ealculat- ingly, she listens. balancing want and entreaty with a grim nicety of judg- ment. Then she drives her bargain shrewdly.
 They get her money and they pay her price
 So rolls up the fortune from which she has long been famed as the rich est woman in America. There is the possible exception of Mrs. Russell Sage. but hers was 'anisassed by her hus- band. In all history there has been no other woman who. by the exercise of her own ingenuity, has made so much money as this supreme woman financier.
 Yet the Midas touch that has fair ly incrusted her life with gold has been a fatal gift. For Hetty Green Is really a bankrupt today, bankrupt in desire. With money to buy all that the world has for sale. it holds noth- ing that she, would like. She has strewn in acres from Boston to San Francisco. She owns railroad and steamboat lines copper mines Tn Michigan, gold mines in Nevada, iron mines in Missouri. telegraph and tele- phone securities and government bonds. and in her safe is locked a pint of dia- monds and one of the finest collee- tions of pearlS oH earth. Yet the girl stenographer who tak es her dictatton probably has a lighter heart under new spring gown. the butcher from whom she buys chuck steak at twelve cents a pound has better Sunday din- ner, and her neighbors in Hoboken flat when they go on Coney Island outIngI brighten the monochrome Of existence with more of color than va ries her drab days.
 Poor Hetty Green, least happy Wo- man in New York!