ing or find out how much there
was to learn and how little I knew. I felt that my foot was upon the
ladder and that I was bound to climb.

I had only one fear, and that was that I could not learn quickly
enough the addresses of the various business houses to which messages
had to be delivered. I therefore began to note the signs of these
houses up one side of the street and down the other. At night I
exercised my memory by naming in succession the various firms. Before
long I could shut my eyes and, beginning at the foot of a business
street, call off the names of the firms in proper order along one side
to the top of the street, then crossing on the other side go down in
regular order to the foot again.

The next step was to know the men themselves, for it gave a messenger
a great advantage, and often saved a long journey, if he knew members
or employees of firms. He might meet one of these going direct to his
office. It was reckoned a great triumph among the boys to deliver a
message upon the street. And there was the additional satisfaction to
the boy himself, that a great man (and most men are great to
messengers), stopped upon the street in this way, seldom failed to
note the boy and compliment him.

The Pittsburgh of 1850 was very different from what it has since
become. It had not yet recovered from the great fire which destroyed
the entire business portion of the city on April 10, 1845. The houses
were mainly of wood, a few only were of brick, and not one was
fire-proof. The entire population in and around Pittsburgh was not
over forty thousand. The business portion of the city did not extend
as far as Fifth Avenue, which was then a very quiet street, remarkable
only for having the theater upon it. Federal Street, Allegheny,
consisted of straggling business houses with great open spaces between
them, and I remember skating upon ponds in the very heart of the
present Fifth Ward. The site of our Union Iron Mills was then, and
many years later, a cabbage garden.

General Robinson, to whom I delivered many a telegraph message, was
the first white child born west of the Ohio River. I saw the first
telegraph line stretched from the east into the city; and, at a later
date, I also saw the first locomotive, for the Ohio and Pennsylvania
Railroad, brought by canal from Philadelphia and unloaded from a scow
in Allegheny City. There was no direct railway communication to the
East. Passengers took the canal to the foot