And tenacity was bred, as well as born, into Cyrus McCormick. He went barefooted as a boy, not for lack of shoes, but to make him tough. "I want my boys to know how to endure hardship," said his mother. He sat on a slab bench in the little log school house and learned to read from the Book of Genesis. He sang Psalms with forty verses, on Sundays, and sat as still as a graven image during the three-hour sermons, for his father was a Presbyterian of the old Covenanter brand. So it came to pass that Cyrus McCormick clung to his reaper, as John Knox had to his Bible. "His whole soul was wrapped up in it," said one of his neighbours. He grew as indifferent to the rough jokes of the farmers as Martin Luther was to the sneers of the village priests. The making of reapers became more than a business. It was a creed--a religion--a new eleventh commandment. By the time he was thirty, he had become a nineteenth century Mohammed, ready for a world crusade. His war-cry was--Great is the Reaper, and McCormick is its prophet. Like Mohammed, he had his visions of future glory. On one occasion, while riding on horseback through a wilderness path, the dazzling thought flashed upon his mind--"Perhaps I may make a million dollars from this reaper." This idea remained for years the driving wheel of his brain. "The thought was so enormous," he said afterward, "that it seemed like a dream--like dwelling in the clouds--so remote, so unattainable, so exalted, so visionary." Also, like Mohammed, he had a period of preparatory solitude. Soon after the first exhibition of his reaper, he bought a tract of land and farmed it alone, with two aged Negroes as housekeepers. Here he lived for more than a year with no companion except his reaper. He seemed at this time, too, to have resolved upon a life of celibacy, for I find in one of his letters an allusion to two young ladies of unusual attractiveness. "They are pretty, smart and rich," he writes, "but alas, I have other business to attend to!" [Illustration: THE VIRGINIAN BIRTHPLACE OF THE McCORMICK REAPER.] The two things of which he stood most in need were money and cheaper iron. So, after thinking over the situation in his lonely cabin, he decided to build a furnace and make his own iron. His father and a neighbour joined him in the enterprise. They built the furnace, made the iron, and might have forgotten the reaper, if the financial earthquake of 1839 had not shaken them down into the general wreckage. The neighbour who had been made a partner signed over his property to his mother, and threw the whole burden of the bankruptcy upon the McCormick family, crushing them for a time into an abyss of debt and poverty. Cyrus McCormick gave up everything he owned to the creditors--everything except his reaper, which nobody wanted. So far his vision of wealth was still a dream. Instead of being the possessor of a million, he was eight years older, and penniless.