On regaining consciousness, he saw two Belgian officers beside him, one with a lantern and the other dressing his wounds. They carried him to a motor car in the road. Arriving at the field hospital, near the general headquarters of the Belgian army, he got a better view of the two officers. One of them he recognized, saluted, and started to speak, but the king hushed him.
“All right, my brave hero,” he said; “save your strength; the world can’t afford to lose men like you.”
Woman, 100, Leads in Dance; Blesses Sturdy Ancestors.
Doubtless, as she says, Mrs. Emily Mayhew Osborne’s sturdy health heritage from New England ancestry has something to do with her century’s lease on life. “I have lived to enjoy vigorous old age because of the clean, moral life of my forefathers,” she said.
Nevertheless, when the orchestra tuned up for the one-hundredth-birthday celebration at 660 East 164th Street, New York recently, Mrs. Osborne led her fifteen descendants in a tango step. Four grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren joined in the applause which greeted this skillful attempt to reconcile Puritan ancestry with modern liberalism.
One hundred years rest lightly on the shoulders of this direct descendant of Thomas Mayhew, the first governor of Martha’s Vineyard, who received a royal grant of Nantucket Island in 1641. She is hale and hearty,[{60}] takes a long walk every day, and sews several hours at a stretch.
“Yes, I use glasses,” commented Mrs. Osborne, anticipating the next question, “but understand, now, that I don’t have to use them. They rest my eyes—that’s all.”
When she came to New York City from Columbia County, a woman of one and twenty, Manhattan Island above Fourteenth Street was mostly pasturage. “Yes, Broadway was nothing but a pathway for cattle, and Fourteenth Street was a little lane!” she exclaimed, in a flash of reminiscence.
After the death of her first husband, John Wilson Higgins, Mrs. Osborne married Samuel Osborne, who died many years ago. Of the eight children she has borne, two are living, Miss Emily Higgins and Mrs. Victor Smith.
Beginning in the afternoon, Mrs. Osborne’s birthday party lasted into the evening, with friends and neighbors dropping in to leave flowers and extend congratulations.