hour or two at a time in his chair, and then would take a lantern, go out and catch the ewes, and hold them while the lambs sacked. He would very often bring in a little dead-looking lamb, and put it in warm water and rub it until it showed signs of life, and then wrap it in a warm blanket, feed it warm milk with a teaspoon, and work over it with such tenderness that in a few hours it would be capering around the room. One Monday morning I had just got my white clothes in a nice warm suds in the wash-tub, when he came in bringing a little dead-looking lamb. There seemed to be no sign of life about it. Said he, 'Take out your clothes quick, and let me put this lamb in the water.' I felt a little vexed to be hindered with my washing, and told him I didn't believe he could make it live; but in an hour or two he had it running around the room, and calling loudly for its mother. The next year he came from the barn and said to me, 'Ruth, that lamb I hindered you with when you were washing, I have just sold for one hundred dollars.' It was a pure-blooded Saxony lamb."[1]
By 1845 wealth again seemed all but within the grasp of John Brown. The country was entering fully upon one of the most remarkable of many noteworthy periods of industrial expansion and the situation in the wool business was particularly favorable. The flock of Saxony sheep owned by Perkins and Brown was "said to be the finest and most perfect flock in the United States and worth
- ↑ Ruth Brown in Sanborn, p. 95.
