Page:Luther S. Livingston (Parker).djvu/14

 married Benjamin Livingston. His father, Samuel, left Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the son reached the Michigan settlement by way of western New York and Canada.

The first money that Luther Samuel Livingston earned, by vacation work sweeping after the laborers on a street-paving contract undertaken by his father, was spent for a pair of heavy tramping shoes and for a set of Chambers' Cyclopaedia of English Literature. When he left the high school in 1881, he went to work in a local bookshop. Four years later he was obliged by ill health to give up regular indoors employment, and spent the summer months collecting butterflies and wild flowers in the fields and swamps near Grand Rapids. In the autumn he secured a position in another bookstore, where he stayed until 1887, when he went to New York and became the shipping clerk for Dodd, Mead & Company.

Livingston never liked city ways, and in 1888 he took up a plot of government land at Melbourne, near the head of navigation on the St. John's River in Florida. The inspiration for this venture came from the books of Thoreau. He was ambitious to