JAMES OLIVER
James Oliver was born in Roxburyshire, Scotland, August the Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-three. He died March the Second, Nineteen Hundred Eight. He was the youngest of a brood of eight—six boys and two girls.
He was "the last run of shad," to use the phrase of Theodore Parker, who had a similar honor. Just why the youngest should eclipse the rest, as occasionally happens, is explained by Doctor Tilden on the hypothesis that a mother gives this last little surprise party an amount of love and tenderness not vouchsafed the rest.
Let the philosophers philosophize—we deal with facts, not theories, and no one will deny that James Oliver was a very potent, human and stubborn fact. He was Scotch.
His father was a shepherd on a landed estate, where the noses of the sheep grew sharp that they might feed between the stones. The family was very poor, but poverty in the Old World grows into a habit, and so the Olivers did not suffer. They huddled close for warmth in their little cottage and were grateful for parritch and shelter.
In Eighteen Hundred Thirty, the oldest boy, John, filled with the spirit of unrest, tied up all of his earthly goods in a red handkerchief and came to America.
He found work at a dollar a day, and wrote glowing letters home of a country where no one picked up fagots for fires, but where forests were actually in the way. He also said he ate at his employer's table, and they had meat three times a week. Of course he had meat three times a day, but he didn't want to run the risk of being placed in the Ananias Club by telling the truth.
A little later, Andrew and Jane, the next in point of age, came too, and slipped at once into money-making jobs, piling up wealth at the rate of three dollars a week.