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 that always laughed a harvest under the skilful management of Danforth Armour. Yet the market for surplus products was distant, so luxury and leisure were out of the question. And yet work wasn't drudgery. Woods, hills, running streams, the sawmill and the gristmill, the path across the meadow, the open road, the miracle of the seasons, the sugar-bush, the freshet that carried away the bridge, the first Spring flowers peeping from beneath the snow on the south side of rotting logs, the trees bursting into leaf, the hills white with blossoms of wild cherry and hawthorn, the Saturday afternoon when the boys could fish, the old swimming-hole, the bathing of the little ones in the creek, the growing crops in the bottom-land, bee-trees and wild honey, coon-hunts by moonlight, the tracks of deer down by the salt-lick, bears in the green corn, harvest-time, hog-killing days, frost upon the pumpkin and fodder in the shock, wild turkeys in the clearing, revival-meetings, spelling-bees, debates at the schoolhouse, school at the log schoolhouse in Stockbridge, barn-raisings, dances in the new barn, quilting-bees, steers to break, colts to ride, apple butter, soft soap, pickled pigs' feet, smoked hams, side-meat, shelled walnuts, coonskins on the barn-door, Winter and the first fall of snow, boots to grease, harness to mend, backlogs, hickory-nuts, cider, a few books and all the other wonderful and enchanting things that a country life, not too isolated, brings to the boys and girls born where the rain makes musical patter on the roof and the hand of a loving mother tucks you in at night!