--_Proverbs xx: 4_

You benefit yourself only as you benefit humanity.

--_James Oliver_

[Illustration: 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.

When three of a brood have gone from the home nest, they pull hard on
the heartstrings of the mother. Women, at the last, have more courage
than men--when they have.

Partnerships are very seldom equal partnerships--one takes the lead. In
this case the gray mare was the better horse, and James Oliver got his
initiative from his mother.

"We are all going to America," the mother would say.

And then the worthy shepherd-man would give a hundred and fifty reasons
why it was impossible.

He ha