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

SHAKSPEARE’S PLAYS.

One night he approached his friend and announced that the die was cast, and that he should become an actor.  Nothing could be worse than he was doing.  Absolutely no business paid less than eight dollars per week, unless it were his own itself which had paid him seven dollars.  It was a summer month.  A theatre was empty.  A dramatic agent had agreed to get up a company and run the place a week.  It would require only twenty-five dollars from the young man.  He would then be a sharer in the profits, would be given a minor part in the cast of characters, and would thereafter be secured

AN ENGAGEMENT WITH JOHN M’CULLOUGH