ssengers on that elevator was sympathetic. His
name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built
man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only
passenger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human
being.

After that, I mounted a milk-wagon and served milk in the region of
West Fifty-seventh Street. This drop into the cellars of the
well-to-do gave me contact from another angle with janitors,
janitresses, and servants. I started at four o'clock each morning. I
did not finish until late in the afternoon, but I had all of Sunday
off. I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed
to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous
turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses.

The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my
Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars. My grammar, when
weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart.

From the milk-wagon I went to a publishing house. They had advertised
for a man with some literary ability, and I had the effrontery to
apply. I drove the milk-cart in front of the publishing-house door,
and, with my working clothes bespattered with milk and grease, I
applied personally for the job.

"What are your qualifications?" the manager asked.

"What kind of work do you want done?" I asked in reply. I found that
they were going to make a new dictionary of the English language, but
their method of making it obviated the necessity for scholarship. They
had an 1859 edition of Webster and a lot of the newer dictionaries,
and Webster was to be the basis of the new one, and we were to crib
and transcribe from all the rest. I was the third man employed on the
work.

My salary to begin with was ten dollars a week. The word "salary" had
a fine sound; it is more refined than "wages," though it was less than
my pay as a milkman. After working a month, I had the temerity to
outline a plan for a dictionary which would necessitate the most
profound scholarship in America. This plan was laughed at, at first,
but finally adopted, and it took seven years and millions of dollars,
and hundreds of the best scholars in the United States and foreign
countries to complete the work. They raised my salary from $10 a week
to $100 a month; but when an opening came to work as a missionary
among the Bowery lodging houses at $60 a month, I considered it the
opportunity of a lifeti