He must have been a skilful man of business, for all the great financial storms of the half century, in which he lived and worked, rolled over him without causing him any serious embarrassment. His note was always good, and his word was as good as his note. He always seemed to have money enough for what he wanted to do. In prosperous times he spent generously, although habitually practising a kind of stoical severity in regard to his private affairs. He considered luxury the bane of wealth, and continually admonished his children to avoid it. He was an old-fashioned Puritan with liberal and progressive ideas. After his marriage in 1843 to Miss Abigail Frances Newell, of Boston, he built a commodious house in a fine grove of chestnuts on a hill-side at East Walpole; and there he brought up his children like Greeks and Amazons. Chestnut woods are commonly infested with hornets, but he directed us boys not to molest them, for he wished them to learn that hornets would not sting unless they were interfered with; an excellent principle in human nature. Mrs. Bird resembled her husband so closely in face and figure, that they might have been mistaken for brother and sister. She was an excellent New England woman of the old style, and well adapted to make her husband comfortable and happy. The connection between manufacturing and politics is a direct and natural one. A man who employs thirty or forty workmen, and treats them fairly, can easily obtain an election to the Legislature without exercising any direct influence over them; but Frank Bird's workmen felt that he had a personal interest in each one of them. He never was troubled with strikes. When hard times came his employees submitted to a reduction of wages without murmuring, and when business was good they shared again in the general prosperity. As a consequence Mr. Bird could go to the Legislature as often as he desired; and when he changed from the Republican to the Democratic party, in 1872, they still continued to vote for him, until at the age of seventy-one he finally retired from public life. On one election day he is said to have called his men together, and to have told them: "You will have two hours this afternoon to cast your votes in. The mill will close at 4 o'clock, and I expect every man to vote as I do. Now I am going to vote just as I please, and I hope you will all do the same; but if any one of my men does not vote just as he wants to, and I find it out, I will discharge him to-morrow." One can imagine Abraham Lincoln making a speech like this, on a similar occasion.