“Listen and I will read the letter.”

“DEAR HARRY,” it commenced, “you will perhaps think it strange that I have written to you; but we used to be good friends.  I write to tell you that I don’t like this place.  I haven’t got along well, and I want to get back.  Now I am going to ask of you a favor.  Will you lend me thirty or forty dollars, to pay my fare home?  I will pay you back in a month or two months sure, after I get to work.  I will also pay you the few dollars which I borrowed some time ago.  I ought to have done it before, but I was thoughtless, and I kept putting it off.  Now, Harry, I know you have the money, and you can lend it to me just as well as not, and I’ll be sure to pay it back before you need it.  Just get a post-office order, and send it to Luke Harrison, 17 R——­ Street, St. Louis, and I’ll be sure to get it.  Give my respects to Mr. Anderson, and also to Mr. Ferguson.

  “Your friend,
    “LUKE HARRISON.”

“There is a chance for a first-class investment, Harry,” said Ferguson.

“Do you want to join me in it?”

“No, I would rather pay the money to have ‘your friend’ keep away.”

“I don’t want to be unkind or disobliging,” said Harry, “but I don’t feel like giving Luke this money.  I know he would never pay me back.”

“Say no, then.”

“I will.  Luke will be mad, but I can’t help it.”

So both Mr. Anderson and Harry wrote declining to lend.  The latter, in return, received a letter from Luke, denouncing him as a “mean, miserly hunks;” but even this did not cause him to regret his decision.

CHAPTER XXXI.

ONE STEP UPWARD.

In real life the incidents that call for notice do not occur daily.  Months and years pass, sometimes, where the course of life is quiet and uneventful.  So it was with Harry Walton.  He went to his daily work with unfailing regularity, devoted a large part of his leisure to reading and study, or writing sketches for the Boston papers, and found himself growing steadily wiser and better informed.  His account in the savings-bank grew slowly, but steadily; and on his nineteenth birthday, when we propose to look in upon him again, he was worth five hundred dollars.

Some of my readers who are favored by fortune may regard this as a small sum.  It is small in itself, but it was not small for a youth in Harry’s position to have saved from his small earnings.  But of greater value than the sum itself was the habit of self-denial and saving which our hero had formed.  He had started in the right way, and made a beginning which was likely to lead to prosperity in the end.  It had not been altogether easy to save this sum.  Harry’s income had always been small, and he might, without incurring the charge of excessive extravagance, have spent the whole.  He had denied himself on many occasions, where most boys of his age would have yielded to the temptation of spending money for pleasure or personal gratification; but he had been rewarded by the thought that he was getting on in the world.