Henry Ford's Own Story

usiastic plans. He had been thinking in the future, planning, rearranging, ad

ccess," he says to-day. "We should be guiding our future by th

rk day or two over that letter-the universal struggle between the

r in his life, but it has never been stronger than his human sympathies. It is in adjusting them to

ar-cut struggle between two opposing forces; on one side the splendid

summer. The plans for the watch factory were not abandoned, they were only laid aside temporarily. It would be possible t

up between the rows; in the house his father was fretting because the hired hands were not feeding the cows properly, and they were giving less milk. The clover was going to seed, while the hogs looked hungrily at

e fields with the men, plowing, planting, harvesting, setting the pace for the others to follow, as an owner must do on a farm. He wa

t bell clanged once, and he and all the men hurried into the house, where, sitting at one long table in the kitchen, they ate the breakfast Margaret and the hired girls brought to the

ose from all the tiny insects in the grass, a note like the voice of the heat. Coats and vests came

from his face. "Where's the water jug? Jim, what say you

n the great bell clanged out the welcome news that Margaret and

omatic, authoritative word with the men plowing there, or perhaps he went a little

cows must be milked, the horses watered, fed and

he pored over his mechanic journals by the sitting-room lamp in the evenings, that he was

ommunity began to center around her. In the evenings the young men of the neighborhood rode over to propose picnics and hay-rides; after church on Sundays

d when the plums were ripe. Late in the afternoon they separated somehow into pairs,

the Ford place must have increased considerably. On this point Ford is discreetly silent, but it does not require any great effort of fancy to see him as he must have looked then, through the ey

ough about his own attitude

t for a long time the small boy opinion of

et back to Detroit, where he could take up ag

arned that there was a boss at the head of affairs. Henry had a little more time to spend in the shop. He found in one co

rid engine on top sputtering and wheezing and rattling, but none the less runni

by week Henry was approaching the time w

as busy in the fields from morning to night. When, late in October, the last work of the summer was done and the fields lay bare and bro

ning the men arrived and then the long supper table was spread with Margaret's cooking-hams, sausages, fried chickens, a whole roast pig, pans of beans and succotash, huge loaves of home-made bread, pats of butter, cheese, cakes, pies, puddings, doug

ht miles from the Ford place and Henry had scarcely seen her that summer. That night

m permission to kiss one of the girls, and still later they danced on the floor of the hay-barn while the fiddler

g project of the watch factory, but he did not. He thought of Clara