"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 young country-boy, who had never seen a college, a city, or a railroad, constructed _the first practical American reaper_. It was a clumsy makeshift--as crude as a Red River ox-cart; but it was built on the right lines. It was not at all handsome or well made or satisfactory; but it was a reaper that reaped. But McCormick soon discovered that it was not enough to invent a reaper. What the world needed was a man who was strong and dominating enough to force his reaper upon the unwilling labourers of the harvest fields. Tenacity! Absolute indifference to defeat! The lust for victory that makes a man unconscious of the blows he gives or takes! This was what was needed, and what Cyrus McCormick possessed, to a greater degree, perhaps, than any other man in American history. Tenacity! It was in his blood. Back of him was the hardiest breed that was ever mixed into the American blend--the pick of the Scots who fought their way to the United States by way of Ireland. These Irish Scots, few as they were, led the way across the Alleghanies, founded Pittsburgh, made a trail to Texas, and put five Presidents in the White House.