But I was starting to tell you about my early start in business.  I had it good and hard all right.  Why when I struck New York—­I was sixteen then—­I had just eighty cents to my name.  I lived on it for nearly a week while I was walking round hunting for a job.  I used to get soup for three cents, and roast beef with potatoes, all you could eat, for eight cents, that tasted better than anything I can ever get in this damn club.  It was down somewhere on Sixth Avenue, but I’ve forgotten the way to it.

Well, about the sixth day I got a job, down in a shoe factory, working on a machine.  I guess you’ve never seen shoe-machinery, have you?  No, you wouldn’t likely.  It’s complicated.  Even in those days there were thirty-five machines went to the making of a shoe, and now we use as many as fifty-four.  I’d never seen the machines before, but the foreman took me on.  “You look strong,” he said “I’ll give you a try anyway.”

So I started in.  I didn’t know anything.  But I made good from the first day.  I got four a week at the start, and after two months I got a raise to four-twenty-five.

Well, after I’d worked there about three months, I went up to the floor manager of the flat I worked on, and I said, “Say, Mr. Jones, do you want to save ten dollars a week on expenses?” “How?” says he.  “Why,” I said, “that foreman I’m working under on the machine, I’ve watched him, and I can do his job; dismiss him and I’ll take over his work at half what you pay him.”  “Can you do the work?” he says.  “Try me out,” I said.  “Fire him and give me a chance.”  “Well,” he said, “I like your spirit anyway; you’ve got the right sort of stuff in you.”

So he fired the foreman and I took over the job and held it down.  It was hard at first, but I worked twelve hours a day, and studied up a book on factory machinery at night.  Well, after I’d been on that work for about a year, I went in one day to the general manager downstairs, and I said, “Mr. Thompson, do you want to save about a hundred dollars a month on your overhead costs?” “How can I do that?” says he.  “Sit down.”  “Why,” I said, “you dismiss Mr. Jones and give me his place as manager of the floor, and I’ll undertake to do his work, and mine with it, at a hundred less than you’re paying now.”  He turned and went into the inner office, and I could hear him talking to Mr. Evans, the managing director.  “The young fellow certainly has character,” I heard him say.  Then he came out and he said, “Well, we’re going to give you a try anyway:  we like to help out our employes all we can, you know; and you’ve got the sort of stuff in you that we’re looking for.”

So they dismissed Jones next day and I took over his job and did it easy.  It was nothing anyway.  The higher up you get in business, the easier it is if you know how.  I held that job two years, and I saved all my salary except twenty-five dollars a month, and I lived on that.  I never spent any money anyway.  I went once to see Irving do this Macbeth for twenty-five cents, and once I went to a concert and saw a man play the violin for fifteen cents in the gallery.  But I don’t believe you get much out of the theatre anyway; as I see it, there’s nothing to it.