"The clerk then gave the amount. It was less than $1,000. Mr. Armour took his check-book, and wrote out an order for the amount. 'There,' he said, as he handed the clerk the check, 'there is enough to pay all your debts. Now I want you to keep out of debt, and if I hear of your getting into debt again you will have to leave.' "The man took the check. He did pay his debts, and remodelled his life on a cash basis. About a year after the above incident happened he came to Mr. Armour, and told him that he had had a place offered him at a higher salary, and that he was going to leave. He thanked Mr. Armour, and told him that his last year had been the happiest of his life, and that getting out of debt had made a new man of him." When Mr. Armour was asked by Mr. Carpenter to what he attributed his great success, he replied:-- "I think that thrift and economy have had much to do with it. I owe much to my mother's training, and to a good line of Scotch ancestors, who have always been thrifty and economical." Mr. Armour has not been content to spend his life in amassing wealth only. After the late Joseph Armour bequeathed a fund to establish Armour Mission, Philip D. Armour doubled the fund, or more than doubled it; and now the Mission has nearly two thousand children in its Sunday-school, with free kindergarten and free dispensary. Mr. Armour goes to the Mission every Sunday afternoon, and finds great happiness among the children. To yield a revenue yearly for the Mission, Mr. Armour built "Armour Flats," a great building adjoining the Mission, with a large grass-plot in the centre, where in two hundred and thirteen flats, having each from six to seven rooms, families can find clean and attractive homes, with a rental of from seventeen to thirty-five dollars a month. "There is an endowed work," says Mr. Armour, "that cannot be altered by death, or by misunderstandings among trustees, or by bickerings of any kind. Besides, a man can do something to carry out his ideas while he lives, but he can't do so after he is in the grave. Build pleasant homes for people of small incomes, and they will leave their ugly surroundings, and lead brighter lives." Mr. Armour, aside from many private charities, has given over a million and a half dollars to the Armour Institute of Technology. The five-story fire-proof building of red brick trimmed with brown stone was finished Dec. 6, 1892, on the corner of Thirty-third Street and Armour Avenue; and the keys were put in the hands of the able and eloquent preacher, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, "to formulate," says the Chicago _Tribune_, Oct. 15, 1893, "more exactly than Mr. Armour had done the lines on which this work was to go forward. Dr. Gunsaulus had long ago reached the conclusion that the best way to prepare men for a home in heaven is to make it decently comfortable for them here."