holesale drygoods
house in Boston. As entry clerk I did not shine, but I continued to keep
the place until the firm failed--whether or not because of my connection
with it I am not sure, though I doubt if my services were sufficiently
important to contribute toward even this result. A month later I
obtained another position and, after that, another. I was never
discharged; I declare that with a sort of negative pride; but when I
announced to my second employer my intention of resigning he bore the
shock with--to say the least--philosophic fortitude.

"We shall miss you, Knowles," he observed.

"Thank you, sir," said I.

"I doubt if we ever have another bookkeeper just like you."

I thanked him again, fighting down my blushes with heroic modesty.

"Oh, I guess you can find one if you try," I said, lightly, wishing to
comfort him.

He shook his head. "I sha'n't try," he declared. "I am not as young and
as strong as I was and--well, there is always the chance that we might
succeed."

It was a mean thing to say--to a boy, for I was scarcely more than that.
And yet, looking back at it now, I am much more disposed to smile and
forgive than I was then. My bookkeeping must have been a trial to his
orderly, pigeon-holed soul. Why in the world he and his partner put up
with it so long is a miracle. When, after my first novel appeared,
he wrote me to say that the consciousness of having had a part, small
though it might be, in training my young mind upward toward the success
it had achieved would always be a great gratification to him, I did not
send the letter I wrote in answer. Instead I tore up my letter and his
and grinned. I WAS a bad bookkeeper; I was, and still am, a bad business
man. Now I don't care so much; that is the difference.

Then I cared a great deal, but I kept on at my hated task. What else was
there for me to do? My salary was so small that, as Charlie Burns, one
of my fellow-clerks, said of his, I was afraid to count it over a bare
floor for fear that it might drop in a crack and be lost. It was my only
revenue, however, and I continued to live upon it somehow. I had a
small room in a boarding-house on Shawmut Avenue and I spent most of my
evenings there or in the reading-room at the public library. I was not
popular at the boarding-house. Most of the young fellows there went
out a good deal, to call upon young ladies or to dance or to go to the
theater. I had learned to dance when I was at school and