He commenced with three men, working himself. The little shop prospered and grew. Before long it was sending out shoes all over the country. As machinery was improved and a greater output became possible, the shop increased its business and began to export shoes. From the original output of forty-eight pairs of shoes a week it has grown to fifteen thousand pairs a day, and the shoes are sent all over the world.
The making of shoes and the organization of a great Industry has not absorbed Mr. Douglas’s whole attention. As a Democrat he has been a member of the Massachusetts House and Senate, Mayor of Brockton, and in 1903 he was elected Governor of Massachusetts, though the State is usually Republican. He worked during his campaign the way he worked in business, putting in the number of hours a day necessary to complete the task set, and he kept his political lieutenants working the same way. By this means he became the first Democratic executive the State has had since 1893, and he gave the people a business administration they liked.
It was Governor Douglas who settled the disastrous Fall River strike, after a number of futile attempts had been made to bring about an understanding, and his findings appealed to both sides, for the workers knew he had once worked in the mill and the employers recognized his acute business sense.
Fortune.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases, being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste and color from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us not with their heat, but our own, which they are adapted to cover and keep in.—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG.
Though the fame of Henry Kingsley (1830–1876) is eclipsed by that of his elder brother, Charles, many critics have been bold enough to predict that the time will come when the English-speaking world will recognize the younger of these brothers as the greater writer. Henry Kingsley, leaving Oxford without taking a degree, went to Australia when he was twenty-three years old, and it was not until his return to England, five years later, that he addressed himself to novel-writing. His most popular books were “Geoffrey Hamlin” and “Ravenshoe.” He wrote few poems, and of these “The Blackbird’s Song,” which is here reprinted for the readers of The Scrap Book, probably is the best known. It has the real lilt of the English blackbird, and this, together with its quaint diction, gives to it a peculiar quality that causes it to linger in the mind long after the book containing the poem has been laid aside.
By HENRY KINGSLEY.