Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/150

130 pose one must make some concession to the style." I once reminded him that the braid had wholly disappeared from the rim of his hat. "You say the braid is gone?" he said. "Now, don't you see that that hat has reached a perfect development? It has got where nothing more can happen to it." Nobody can know better than I that these be trivialities; but they linger in memory with a certain sweetness and I venture to set them down for what they may be worth as illustrating a certain engaging simplicity in one who, the more I see of life, looms heroic in my firmament of men.

I cannot feel that it would be in place to speak particularly of the domestic side of Mr. Scott's life. He was singularly and devotedly a family man—fond of his home, the devoted lover of the sweet woman who was his wife, and a father to whom no labor or sacrifice was ever a weariness. He was not one to find entertainment at clubs, at theatres or at other assemblages; his personal interest outside of his office was within the four walls of home and there he spent practically every hour that was not given to his labors or to out-of-doors recreation of which he was fond. Formidable figure that he was in most relationships, he shed his austerities when he hung his hat on the hall rack. Many years ago with practically the first considerable fund that was available for other than business necessities, he built the spacious and dignified house in which he lived to his death. He loved to adorn it with art and to enrich it with treasures. Yet his taste for other things never overbore certain cherished sentiments. In the great library in which he passed the larger part of his time, the portrait of his father had the place of honor. The shelves which held his most valued volumes were made of boards retrieved many years ago from the pioneer house in Tazewell County in Illinois built by his father's hands and in which himself and his brothers and sisters were born. I hardly need to add that the man whose propensities to domestic life and whose family sentiment was so marked a feature of his char-