Page:The Stephenson Family (1906).pdf/83

 a little girl. She married James D. Pickens, an industrious, well-to-do farmer in the Mount Hope neighborhood. They reared a large family of sons and daughters. Artemisia died before any of her children were married. Thomas Pickens, their oldest living son, lives on and owns the old farm. He has raised a respectable, nice family. The children are now mostly grown, some of them married and settled on farms in the old neighborhood.

America, the oldest daughter of James D. Pickens and his wife, Artemisia Stephenson, was for years under my tutelage. She was an interesting and an affectionate girl. She married Dick McClung. They reared a son and a daughter. The son is a Cumberland Presbyterian preacher; the daughter is an assistant teacher in the Mount Hope Wallace Institute. Some of the Pickens children went to Texas as they came to the years of maturity. They seem to have inherited that Stephenson characteristic of looking out for an independence. "The mere fact that a boy nearing the age of manhood desires to go away from a pleasant home and use his own resources is a good indication that he will get along. If he objects to being pampered, there is nothing to be gained by pampering him. To withhold from him the chance he craves might be a serious error. There is no disgrace in hard work, and there is no lasting hurt from hard knocks. The men who make the best record have not planned their career while resting on 'flowery beds of ease,' nor gone forth with the backing of a bank account piled up by somebody else. There is scant reason to fret about the boy who is eager to become a wageearner and selects arduous toil as his portion in the beginning."