Henry Ford's Own Story. Rose Wilder Lane

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СКАЧАТЬ were ripe. Late in the afternoon they separated somehow into pairs, as young people ​will do, and walked the three miles to church for the evening services.

      It may be imagined that the girls of the neighborhood were interested when Henry appeared in church again, now a good-looking young man of twenty-one, back from the city. The social popularity of 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 eyes of the Greenfield girls, an alert, muscular fellow, with a droll humor and a whimsical smile. Moreover, the driver of the finest horses in the neighborhood, and one of the heirs to the big farm.

      However, he is outspoken enough about his own attitude. He did not care for girls.

      Like most men with a real interest, he kept for a long time the small boy opinion of them. "Girls?—huh! What are they good for?"

      He was interested in machines. He wanted to get back to Detroit, where he could take up again his plans for that mammoth watch factory.

      In a few weeks he had brought the farm up to its former running order, the crops were doing well and the hired men had learned 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 corner of it the absurd steam engine he ​had built five years before, and one day he started it up and ran it around the yard.

      It was a weird-looking affair, the high wagon wheels warped and wobbly, the hybrid engine on top sputtering and wheezing and rattling, but none the less running, in a cloud of smoke and sparks. He had a hearty laugh at it and abandoned it.

      His father grew better slowly, but week by week Henry was approaching the time when he could return to the work he liked.

      Late summer came with all the work of getting in the crops. The harvest crew arrived from the next farm, twenty men of them, and Henry was 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 brown, waiting for the snow, Margaret Ford gave a great harvest supper with a quilting bee in the afternoon and corn husking in the evening.

      All the neighbors came from miles around. The big barns were crowded with their horses and rows of them were tied under the sheds. In the house the quilting frames were spread in the big attic, and all afternoon the women sewed and talked. In the evening 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, doughnuts, ​pitchers of milk and cider—good things which disappeared fast enough before the plying knives and forks, in bursts of laughter, while jokes were called from end to end of the table and young couples blushed under the chaffing of their neighbors.

      Clara Bryant was one of the guests. Her father was a prosperous farmer who lived eight miles from the Ford place and Henry had scarcely seen her that summer. That night they sat side by side and he noticed the red in her cheeks and the way she laughed.

      After supper there was corn husking in the big barn, where each young man tried to find the red ears that gave him permission to kiss one of the girls, and still later they danced on the floor of the hay-barn while the fiddler called the figures of the old square dances and the lanterns cast a flickering light on the dusty mounds of hay.

      The next week Henry might have returned to Detroit and to the waiting project of the watch factory, but he did not. He thought of Clara Bryant and realized that his prejudice against girls was unreasonable.

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