The laird of Briarcliff

              THE LAIRD OF BRIARCLIFF
BY ANDREW CARNEGIE
I-N our new and expanding land it is seldom, so far, that captains of industry resolve to abandon the absorbing pursuit of wealth when competence even beyond the dreams of avarice has been thrust upon them. Let us therefore not fail to record one who has just passed away as a shining exception: Morris K. Jesup, a man who broadened and grew wiser year after year, and then, throwing down the cares of business, attained unique position for service rendered to his fellows. Many men have tried this path, but few have trodden it happily and usefully to the end. It requires indomitable will to march on, saying to innumerable temptations, " Get thee behind me ! I shall not spend my old age grabbing for more dollars which I do not need." On the other hand, experience teaches us that miserly traits develop and strengthen year after year, and that the acquisition of more money deadens lofty and generous aspirations until the miserable, feeble old man finally becomes centered more and more in self, and avarice becomes the vice of his old age. A clever lady, becoming interested in Swedenborg's remarkable so-called revelations, read that men act out their ruling loves in heaven. She wondered what they would get for a noted old miser to do there,, his ruling love being to a certainty for the root of all evil. Thinking for a moment, she remarked, " Oh I there will be the golden harps to trim and weigh. I suppose he would be kept working in the metal." She certainly said this, but when some one told her he had enjoyed hearing the story, she disclaimed the remark. " That would never suit him," she retorted ; " his ' ruling love' would not be satisfied unless he were just boiling the metal down solid." The ruling love of Mr. Law, the subject of our short memoir, was not of this character i
But we must begin at the beginning. Mr. Walter W. Law, although really born upon English soil not far from the \Scotch border, tells us that his intense
love for Scotland and many Scotch traits and contributory circumstances convince him that his " forebears " had recently moved across the line southward before his birth. From what the writer knows of him, he is certain that no Scot could dispute this claim " as man and brither." Mr. Law's early training was strict, according to the ideas of the time ; both, father and mother were stern Nonconformists, leading godly lives, setting the best of examples to their children, and duly training them in the fear of the Lord. The father was a man of Independent thought and a member of the body known by that name, his mother a woman of indomitable energy and enterprise. It was soon obvious that the laddie was his mother's " ain son " in these as jn other respects. At fourteen he was set to work as cash-boy in a draper's shop, and contributed to the family revenues, the surest mode of preserving him from malign influences, for to become one of the breadwinners of the family was an exalted position for a lad to reach so early.
He was a reading boy, which means much, and fortunately he became deeply interested in America and read everything pertaining to the Republic. Ah 1 little can the native American know what it means to the born Briton to read of a land where one man's privilege is every man's right, where there are no classes; no man born to rank or office, but every man born to what he can attain to; and where merit, not birth, not what your father was, but what you are, are the only tests. This is the prime prize every American is bom to. This is the "fair deal," and it lies at the root of our sturdy independence, and makes the American boy more of a man than the British boy can possibly be, and the American less of a snob than the Briton. Matthew Arnold once said to the writer, explaining an incident, " My dear Carnegie, we are-all snobs. Eight hundred years of snobbery in our veins, we can't help it." There was not a drop of the snob in young Law after he had read not only
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