MR CARNEGIE AS AN OUTDOOR MAN.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume L, Issue 9002, 26 January 1906, Page 6

MR CARNEGIE AS AN OUTDOOR MAN.

Mr W. T. Stead contributes to C. B. Fry's Magazine a sketch of Andrew Carnegie as an outdoor man. Hh health is attributed to the fact that he has always spent a considerable portion of each day in the open air. From his boyhood upwards he has never taken kindly to the confinement of the office, the mill, or the factory. When he was a weaver's bairn in Dumfermline Town, as now, when he is Laird of Skibo. lie is most at his ease under the broad canopy of heaven.

From twelve to fifteen he was in the I bobbin, factory; then he took to the open-air life of a telegraph boy; next he became clerk and operator in the Pennsylvania Railroad. Mr Stead says: "Hte duties caused him to be out and about a good deal, and he has spent his Sundays in summer in wandering with his companions through the woods. It was on one of these Sunday afternoon strolls through the woods that young Carnegie showed his boy companions the first cheque he ever received as interest on capital. He cried 'Eureka!' for before, that none of them Jbad never received anything but wages from toil. 'How money could make money — how without attention from me 1 this mysterious golden visitor should come — led to much .speculation. I had never <received anything before for noth ing, as it were. To a thorough-going Socialist that scene in the Pennsylvania forest makes a latter-tfay. up-to-date companion picture to the 'Temptation in Eden.' " Of his later life Mr Stead says : "Mr Carnegie has been all round the world 'seeing things.' He has been in India, in Egypt, and knows more about the British Empire, than most of the men who are governing it. He has driven, or been driven, in a four-in-hand from Land's End to John o' Groat*, and has probably seen more of Britain and the Britons than any of our Home Secretaries." Travel. by land and sea that brings him easily and rapidly to the scene of human ' interest is set down as the chief outdoor amusement of Mr Carnegie. Mr Carnegie is said frankly to prefer his estate at Skibo to the Celestial City : "He reveh in the glimpses of moor and sky in the blue firth. He loves his trees ■and his gardens. It. is no* eaactly the delight of the poet in the beauty of nature, who in ecstacy declares, 'My Father made them all.' Mr Carnegie feels that, no doubt, but it is a comfort to him to reflect that, if God made them, Andrew Carnegie helped to mind them." He never smokes. No one but a duke or a king is allowed to smoke at Skibo Castle. He neither plays cricket nor football; he does not hunt. He provides grouse-shooting only for his guest®. He drives, he walks, he golfs, he fishes. Such, are his outdoor amusements. Skibo is a great open-air toy. with which he is never tired of playing.