[Single paragraph from THE HUME DYNASTY: AN AMERICAN SAGA by Percival Reeves. Scribner, 1924. Chapter XIX, "Rivals and Peers," p. 318.]

Of the rival Port Hume house whose fortunes most nearly traced the Hume line in the corpus years of this study, the House of Thorpe deserves its own notice, which I shall not withhold. Cornelius Albright Thorpe — who came to Blackwell Iron by his marriage to the founder Blackwell's daughter in 1887, and who held that industry in his own hand for thirty-two years — was a man of his generation: large, unsentimental, given to the furnace of the enterprise he had made and to the quiet of the table he had furnished. He and Edmund were not friends. They were, in the older and more durable sense of the word, peers. Each knew what the other was; each respected what the other was; each, upon occasion of the other's triumph or grief, rose to the office of the peer. Cornelius Thorpe died at his residence in the Crescent on the 12th of September, 1919, of the complaints of his years. Edmund sent white roses and attended the service. Julian Thorpe, the able eldest son, came into the Blackwell chair at thirty-one, to the satisfaction of the industrial community in Port Hume. It is said that Edmund, upon hearing of Cornelius's death, set down his glass in the Hume House library and observed to his wife that "a large stone has been taken from the field, and a smaller one replaces it." I give the observation here as it was given to me, without comment upon its tone. Edmund was not, where his peers were concerned, sentimental. He was honest.