Philip D. Armour - Page 2

red head. The Brooks family was Scotch, too, but they had fought on the side of Royalty. They were never rebels--they were true to the King--exactly so!

Now, there are two kinds of Scotch--the fair and the dark--the Highland and the Lowland--the Aristocrats and the Peasantry. Miss Brooks was dark, and she succeeded in convincing the freckled and sandy-haired man that he was of a race of rebels, also that the rule of the rebels was brief--brief, my lord, as woman's love. Then they argued as to the alleged brevity of woman's love.

Here they were getting on dangerous ground. Nature is a trickster, and she spread her net and caught the Highland maid and the Lowland laddie, and bound them with green withes as is her wont. So they were married by the Congregational "meenister," and for a wedding-tour fared forth Westward to fame and fortune. "Out West" then meant York State, and the "Far West" was Ohio. They reached Oneida County, New York, and stopped for a few days ere they pushed on to the frontier. The site was beautiful, the location favorable. And the farmer at whose house they were making their stay was restless and wanted to sell out.

That night the young couple talked it over. They had a few hundred dollars saved, sewed in a belt and in a dress bodice. They got the money out and recounted it. In the morning they told their host how much money they had and offered to give him all of this money for his farm. He was to leave them a yoke of oxen, a cow, a pig and six sheep.

He accepted the offer, the money was paid, the deed made out and the man vacated, leaving the bride and groom in possession.

So here they lived their lives; here they worked, planned, aspired and prospered; here, too, their children were born and raised; and down at the little village cemetery they sleep, side by side. In life they were never separated and in death they are not divided.

* * * * * * *

"The first requisite in education," said Herbert Spencer, "is that man shall be a good animal."

Philip D. Armour fulfilled the requirements.

He was dowered with a vital power that fed his restless brain and made him a regular dynamo of energy for sixty-nine years--and with a little care at the last should have run for ninety years with never a hotbox.

He used to say, "If my ancestors had been selected for me by Greek philosophers, specialists in heredity, they could not have done better. I can not imagine a better woman than my mother. My childhood was ideal. God did not overlook me."

Well did this happy, exuberant, healthy man say that his parentage and childhood environment were ideal. Here was a family of six boys and three girls, brought up on a beautiful hillside farm amid as peaceful and lovely a landscape as ever the sun shone upon. Down across the creek there were a hundred acres of bottom-land