welve thousand dollars, and as he handed
me the licence, he said--'Now, don't say that I never offered you this for
a thousand dollars.'"

Hussey's adventurous life was snapped short by a tragic death. While he
was on a train at Baltimore, a little girl was crying for a drink of
water. The kind-hearted old sailor-mechanic got off the train, brought her
a glass of water, and on his way to return the glass, he slipped and fell
between the moving wheels.

Of all the men who fought McCormick in the earlier days, I found only two
now alive--Ralph Emerson, of Rockford, and William N. Whiteley, of
Springfield, Ohio. Both of these men to-day generously give the old
warrior his due.

"McCormick was the first man to make the reaper a success in the field,"
said Whiteley, the battle-worn giant of Ohio, where I found him still at
work. "McCormick was a fighter--a bulldog, we called him; but those were
rough days. The man who couldn't fight was wiped out."

Ralph Emerson, now one of the most venerable figures in Illinois, rose
from a sick-bed against his doctors orders, so that he might be
magnanimous to his former antagonist.

"McCormick's first reapers were a failure," said he, speaking slowly and
with great difficulty; "and he owed his preeminence mainly to his great
business ability. His enemies have said that he was not an inventor, but I
say that he was an inventor of eminence."

So, as the gray haze of years enables us to trace the larger outlines of
his work, we can see that McCormick was especially fitted for a task
which, up to his day, had never been done, and which will never need to be
repeated during the lifetime of our earth. He was absolutely mastered by
one idea, as wholly as Copernicus or Columbus. His business was his life.
It was not accidental, as with Rockefeller, nor incidental, as with
Carnegie. On one occasion when a friend was joking him about his poor
judgment in outside affairs, he whirled around in his chair and said
emphatically: "I have one purpose in life, and only one--the success and
widespread use of my machines. All other matters are to me too
insignificant to be considered."

He made money--ten millions or more. But a hundred millions would not have
bribed him to forsake his reaper. It was as much a part of him as his
right hand. In several of his business letters he writes as though he had
been a Hebrew prophet, charged with a world-message of salvation.

"But for the fact that Providen