It was of a kind very common in our country:  early privation, put to work at thirteen, an attempt to keep him in an office when he longed to have hold of the tools in the shop.  In time his request was granted.  While he worked he observed and studied the organization of the shop and the progression of the raw material to the finished product.  Having mastered the method he left this shop and hired in another, and then in due time in still another shop, much to the disgust of his friends.  But in reply to their warning that “a rolling stone gathers no moss” he said that that was not his aim.  As a result of faithfully following his bent he was ready to respond to the great demand for men to organize and run bicycle factories, and when that demand was followed by the much greater need of doing a similar work in the manufacture of automobiles he was chosen for the very responsible position which he now holds.

[Illustration:  THE GUILD, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.]

There was, to be sure, nothing distinctly spiritual in his story, but after he had finished the young men kept him for two hours answering their questions and there was there revealed to the pastor more of their fine hopes and purposes and possibilities—­their deep-buried yet vital dreams—­than he had ever heard unfolded in any religious meeting.  Many of these youths were taken in hand in a personal way and are now “making good.”  Their subsequent use of leisure, their patronage of evening schools, Y.M.C.A. courses, and many other helps to their ambitions testified to the depth and tenacity of good purposes which were timidly voiced but heroically executed.  On the other hand, the writer has knowledge of many cases of delinquency in which apparently the deciding cause was the vocational misfit foisted upon the young would-be laborer in the trying years between fourteen and sixteen.

There comes to mind the instance of a lad of seventeen found in the Cook County jail.  He had left his Michigan home with fifty dollars of savings and had come to Chicago to make his fortune.  His mother’s story, which was secured after he got into trouble, narrated how that as a boy he had taken to pieces the sewing-machine and the clocks and, unlike many boys, had put them together again without damage.  Reaching Chicago he hired in a garage and conceived the idea of building an automobile.  After the fashion of a boy he became totally absorbed in this project.  His ingenuity and thrift and the help of his employers enabled him to get well along with his enterprise.  But at last he was balked because of lack of a particular part which he knew to be essential, but as to the nature of which he was not informed.