ht dollars a week in a city on the Mississippi River, and was led to
believe that, if he went to Chicago, he could get ten dollars. He was
employed as a clerk in a Commercial Agency, a business which aims to
ascertain the standing and degree of success or lack of fortune of the
retail dealers of the region it covers. He felt that eight dollars a
week were all that he could ever get where he was. Upon his arrival in
the City of Chicago he was put at work for seven dollars, the
representations made to him having proven unreliable. There were about
fifty young men and women in the same room. Seated at his desk when
eight o'clock came, he found that his chances to rise were seemingly
restricted to the hours of noon and six o'clock. In this way he worked
for six months. He was fortunate enough to obtain board at five dollars
a week, leaving him, after his washing, perhaps a dollar and a quarter
clear. To a man of twenty-five years who could see the real difficulties
of his future, the need of a high quality of moral courage was urgent.
And he had it. He got acquainted with a humble friend, considerably
better off, who therefore, could talk to him very bravely of the dignity
of labor, and the honor of paying one's way, even if it took only five
dollars and seventy-five cents to do it. This young friend did thus
encourage and inspire the young clerk, and he was able to set about
improving his mind.

HE READ THE BIBLE THROUGH

during this six months, and thus acquired a style of simple expression
which would be of value to him in his reports when he should travel. He
read Plutarch's Lives. He studied French, and read "The Man Who Laughs"
and "Paul and Virginia," two remarkably different works. You see he was
a man of persistence. But such a mind finds the humiliation of a dollar
and a quarter a week all the more bitter. A man conversing with Plutarch
about the relative merits of Pompey and Lucullus, or of Marius and
Sylla, dislikes to be

DOCKED THREE HOURS

for being ten minutes late, and dislikes to return to his landlady at
the end of the week and give her five-sevenths of the whole spoil of
Bythnia and the Propontis! One day the second assistant manager spoke to
him, and this ray of hope lit his way to a seat on a high stool to write
out "tickets" for merchants who send in to see about Blow & Co., of
Bugleville. This gave him eight dollars a week, and enabled him to go to
a theatre once in a while and hear

SHAK