at least as loyal in friendship as he was bitter in enmity. His wit was keen. The story is told (74) of an exchange of pleasantries between Bush and Governor Sylvester Pennoyer in 1896, when the banker and the governor were on opposite sides of the money question:
I remarked to Mr. Bush: "Mr. Bush, you do not share the opinion of our governor on the financial question?"
"No, indeed. If I were Sylvester I would run my mill more and my mouth less. . ."
. . . Shortly afterward in Portland. . . I met the governor and ventured to repeat the remark of Mr. Bush. Mr. Pennoyer smiled and said: "That remark is characteristic of Bush. There he is in Salem piling up his gold in his vaults, and what good is it going to do him? He cannot take it with him when he dies. If he did, it would all melt."
When I related this to Mr. Bush he said: "Yes, and I should expect to find Sylvester down there with a ladle, dipping it up."
Incidentally, Pennoyer's own "uptake" wasn't so slow, was it? But-he too was a newspaper man.
That Bush was not without his sentimental side is indicated by the little poem he wrote on leaving his beloved Westfield, Mass., to begin his career of 63 years in Oregon:
We do not know how much we love
Until we come to leave;
An aged tree, a common flower
Are things o'er which we grieve;
There is a pleasure in the pain
That brings us back the past again.
. . . . . .
Let what will lure our onward way,
Farewell's a bitter word to say. (75)
This, you understand, doesn't rank him among the poets. But for a hard-bitten publisher-banker. . .
And when, in his old age, he lay down to die, his last remembered words (as quoted in the Ladd & Bush Quarterly) are characteristic.
"Is everything all right?" he asked . . . and when assured that it was, he said, "Keep it so," and with this charge went to sleep.
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