f astronomy until his candle had flickered its
life out. Twenty or more of his letters, which I have seen, are well
written and with a fine use of bookish words.

The one persistent ambition of his life was to invent a reaper. It is also
true, and a titbit of a fact for those who believe in prenatal
influences, that during the year in which Cyrus H. McCormick was born, his
father first began the actual construction of a reaping machine.

Especially during the harvest months, the topic of conversation in the
McCormick home was whether the dream of "reaping grain with horses" could
ever come true. "Reaper," was one of the first words that baby Cyrus
learned to say; and his favourite play-toy, when he grew older, was the
wreck of his father's reaper that wouldn't reap, which lay in rusty
disgrace near the barn-door.

"Often I have seen Robert McCormick standing over his machine," said one
of his neighbours. "He would be studying and thinking, drawing down his
under lip, as was his habit when he was puzzling over anything." His
friends ridiculed him for wasting so much time on a foolish toy, until he
became half ashamed of it himself and quit his experimenting in the
daytime. But at night, he and Cyrus hammered away in the little log
workshop, as though they were a pair of conspirators.

The romantic mystery of these midnight labours made an indelible mark on
the brain of the boy Cyrus. He grew up to be serious and
self-contained--quite unlike the boys of the neighbourhood. He was not
popular and never cared to be.

"Cyrus was a natural mechanical genius from a child," said John Cash, who
worked on the McCormick farm. "He invented the best hillside plough ever
used in this country. He and his father would lock themselves up in the
shop and work for hours on a reaping machine. The neighbours thought they
were both unbalanced to have the idea of cutting grain with horses."

Cyrus was always busy making or mending some piece of machinery. He
abhorred the drudgery of the farm; but delighted in any work that had an
idea behind it. He surprised his teacher one morning by bringing to school
a twenty-inch globe of wood, which turned on its axis as the earth does,
and had the seas and continents outlined in ink.

"That young fellow is ahead of me," said the amazed teacher.

At fifteen Cyrus had invented a new grain cradle. At twenty-one he
improved a machine which his father had made to break hemp. And at
twenty-two this you