are to my credit.

When my wife and I first came to New York our aims and ideals were
simple enough. I had letters to the head of a rather well-known firm on
Wall Street and soon found myself its managing clerk at one hundred
dollars a month. The business transacted in the office was big
business--corporation work, the handling of large estates, and so on.
During three years I was practically in charge of and responsible for
the details of their litigations; the net profit divided by the two
actual members of the firm was about one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars. The gross was about one hundred and eighty thousand, of which
twenty thousand went to defray the regular office expenses--including
rent, stenographers and ordinary law clerks--while ten thousand was
divided among the three men who actually did most of the work.

The first of these was a highly trained lawyer about forty-five years of
age, who could handle anything from a dog-license matter before a police
justice to the argument of a rebate case in the United States Supreme
Court. He was paid forty-five hundred dollars a year and was glad to get
it. He was the active man of the office. The second man received
thirty-five hundred dollars, and for that sum furnished all the special
knowledge needed in drafting railroad mortgages and intricate legal
documents of all sorts. The third was a chap of about thirty who tried
the smaller cases and ran the less important corporations.

The two heads of the firm devoted most of their time to mixing with
bankers, railroad officials and politicians, and spent comparatively
little of it at the office; but they got the business--somehow. I
suppose they found it because they went out after it. It was doubtless
quite legitimate. Somebody must track down the game before the hunter
can do the shooting. At any rate they managed to find plenty of it and
furnished the work for the other lawyers to do.

I soon made up my mind that in New York brains were a pretty cheap
commodity. I was anxious to get ahead; but there was no opening in the
firm and there were others ready to take my place the moment it should
become vacant. I was a pretty fair lawyer and had laid by in the bank
nearly a thousand dollars; so I went to the head of the firm and made
the proposition that I should work at the office each day until one
o'clock and be paid half of what I was then getting--that is, fifty
dollars a month. In the afternoons an understudy