“Do you do that often?” he asked.

“As often as I get a chance,” I answered.

An abiding friendship began that morning between us.  This man might have been a member of the firm and a rich man by this time, but he had a conscience, and it would not permit him to dishonestly keep books, which his employers wanted him to do, and he quit.

My next job was running an elevator in an office building on West Twenty-third Street.  It was one of the old-fashioned, ice-wagon variety, jerked up and down by a wire cable.  It gave me a good opportunity for study.  In the side of the cage I had an arrangement for my Greek grammar.  This of course, could not escape the notice of the business men, and if I was a few seconds late in answering their bell, they always looked like a thunder-cloud in the direction of my grammar.  One of my passengers on that elevator was sympathetic.  His name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only passenger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human being.

After that, I mounted a milk-wagon and served milk in the region of West Fifty-seventh Street.  This drop into the cellars of the well-to-do gave me contact from another angle with janitors, janitresses, and servants.  I started at four o’clock each morning.  I did not finish until late in the afternoon, but I had all of Sunday off.  I found my way by the touch of the hand, and very soon I seemed to have the eyesight of a cat to find shafts, dumb-waiters, circuitous turnings in the sub-cellars of large apartment houses.

The life of a milkman is a busy one, but I found time to mumble my Greek roots as I trotted in and out of the cellars.  My grammar, when weather permitted, was tied open to a bottle in the cart.

From the milk-wagon I went to a publishing house.  They had advertised for a man with some literary ability, and I had the effrontery to apply.  I drove the milk-cart in front of the publishing-house door, and, with my working clothes bespattered with milk and grease, I applied personally for the job.

“What are your qualifications?” the manager asked.

“What kind of work do you want done?” I asked in reply.  I found that they were going to make a new dictionary of the English language, but their method of making it obviated the necessity for scholarship.  They had an 1859 edition of Webster and a lot of the newer dictionaries, and Webster was to be the basis of the new one, and we were to crib and transcribe from all the rest.  I was the third man employed on the work.