through the streets after landing. These sights were
food for his imagination. He compared himself, his qualifications, his
poverty, and his opportunities for advancement in this world of activity
with the advent into New York of the men he had taken as models for his
own career. There was in a general way a striking likeness between the
two pictures as he viewed them. Their struggles had been so long and
fierce that it seemed to him they must have been made of iron to finally
win the fight.

Yet these very difficulties lent attractiveness to the picture. They
made heroes of his models, whose example he burned with enthusiasm to
follow. Thus it will be seen that in the early morning he expected to
meet bitter discouragements, to encounter poverty in its most depressing
form, and to meet rebuffs on the right hand and on the left. He expected
all this. He rather craved it from the sentimental, heroic standpoint,
because the men he had chosen to follow had been compelled to force
their way through a similar opposition.

From this view of the boy it is plain that he was sincere in thanking
young Bob Hunter, a little later, for the newsboy's generous offer to
take him into the paper trade. But a little later still, when he enters
the post office and becomes intoxicated with the sudden, the unexpected,
the overwhelming opportunities displayed before him--the urgent demands,
even, for his services in helping to push forward the commerce of this
vast city, he presents himself in an entirely new light. His head has
been turned. He has lost sight of the early struggles of his heroes,
and now revels in the brilliant pictures drawn by his imagination. How
flattering to himself are these airy, short lived fabrics, and how sweet
to his young ambition!

Had young Randolph been an ordinary boy of slow intellect, he would
never have indulged in these beautiful dreams, which to the stupid mind
would seem silly and absurd, but to him were living realities--creations
to beckon him on, to encourage him in the hours of danger and to sustain
him in the stern battle before him.

Did he then waste his time in what would seem wild imagination, when
a more practically minded boy would have been applying for work? Yes,
in the smaller sense, he idled his time away; but in the broader, he
builded better than he knew. To be sure, he had lost the opportunity of
securing a situation on that day--and he needed work urgently--but he
had fixed upon _a