ambitious nature which makes up the composite that we call the American
Spirit.

Andrew Carnegie very early in life developed the same characteristics.
He never made hasty and ill-digested suggestions and then left them to
others to carry out. When young Carnegie, just turned into his twenties,
became private secretary to Thomas A. Scott, he was getting along as
well, I thank you, as could be expected. And nobody was more delighted
than Andy's mother--not even Andy himself. And most of Andy's joy in his
promotions came from the pleasure which his mother found in his
advancement.

* * * * *

When Thomas A. Scott became President of the Pennsylvania Railroad,
Andrew Carnegie became Superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division, as a
matter of course. His salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year. And
this was the topmost turret of the tower: it was as far as the ambition
of either the mother or the young man could fly. But the end was not
yet.

Thomas Alexander Scott was born at the forgotten hamlet of London,
Franklin County, Pennsylvania. London, Pennsylvania, did not flourish as
its founders had expected. Behold the folly of giving big names to
little things. Caesar Augustus Jones used to be the town fool of East
Aurora, until he was crowded to the wall by Oliver Cromwell Robinson.

Scott walked out of his native village--a lad of ten who warmed his feet
on October mornings where the cows had lain down. Later he came back and
bought the county. Scott was a graduate of the University of Hard
Knocks, and he also took several post-graduate courses. He received
knocks all his life--and gave them. His parents had come from bonny
Scotland, and it was a joke along the whole line of the Pennsylvania
Railroad that a man with red hair and a hot-mush brogue could always get
a job by shouting "Hoot, mon!" at "Tomscot."

Scott loved Andy as well, probably, as he ever loved any one outside of
his own family. He loved him because he was Scotch, and he loved him
because he rounded up every task he attempted. He loved him because he
smiled at difficulty; and he loved him because he never talked back and
said, "We never did it that way before."

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one, President Lincoln made Simon Cameron, of
Pennsylvania, Secretary of War.

Cameron was awfully Scotch, although I believe he was accidentally born
in America. Cameron in time made Thomas A. Scott Assistant Secretary of
War. And T