d sunlight and grass and trees. We rented a neat
little company-house with a big garden in the rear, where we raised
enough potatoes to supply our table. There were window boxes filled with
morning-glories, and lilacs grew in the yard. They company had planted
those lilacs to nourish the souls of the worker's children. They gave
me joy, and that is why the Mooseheart grounds are filled with lilac
bushes.

As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money. Those
feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we should
replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I have often told
how I scraped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shining outfit.
Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to shine
his shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray all week, but the gay
commercial travelers all were dudes and dressed like Sunday every day.
They brought the new fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned
fellows. Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys
hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me revenue.
"Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also," says the proverb,
and my experience proved it true. On my first visit to the hotel I got
acquainted with the landlord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind the
hotel was a cow pen where the milk for the guests was drawn fresh from
the cows. The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the morning and back
at night. I got a dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And
so I had found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America.
The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was less
than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of milk, or
about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who milked them and my
wages for driving them amounted to three cents a gallon. In other words,
the cost of labor in getting the milk from the cows more than doubled
the cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in political economy.
I learned that labor costs are the chief item in fixing the price of
anything.

The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk will be. The
reason wages were high in America was because America was the land of
labor-saving machinery. Little labor was put on any product, and so the
product was cheap, like the landlord's milk. In the iron industry,
for instance, the coal mines and iron ore lay near the mi