“What! my son a peddler and go among rough men upon the wharves!  I would rather throw him into the Allegheny River.  Leave me!” she cried, pointing to the door, and Mr. Hogan went.

She stood a tragic queen.  The next moment she had broken down, but only for a few moments did tears fall and sobs come.  Then she took her two boys in her arms and told us not to mind her foolishness.  There were many things in the world for us to do and we could be useful men, honored and respected, if we always did what was right.  It was a repetition of Helen Macgregor, in her reply to Osbaldistone in which she threatened to have her prisoners “chopped into as many pieces as there are checks in the tartan.”  But the reason for the outburst was different.  It was not because the occupation suggested was peaceful labor, for we were taught that idleness was disgraceful; but because the suggested occupation was somewhat vagrant in character and not entirely respectable in her eyes.  Better death.  Yes, mother would have taken her two boys, one under each arm, and perished with them rather than they should mingle with low company in their extreme youth.

As I look back upon the early struggles this can be said:  there was not a prouder family in the land.  A keen sense of honor, independence, self-respect, pervaded the household.  Walter Scott said of Burns that he had the most extraordinary eye he ever saw in a human being.  I can say as much for my mother.  As Burns has it: 

    “Her eye even turned on empty space,
    Beamed keen with honor.”

Anything low, mean, deceitful, shifty, coarse, underhand, or gossipy was foreign to that heroic soul.  Tom and I could not help growing up respectable characters, having such a mother and such a father, for the father, too, was one of nature’s noblemen, beloved by all, a saint.

Soon after this incident my father found it necessary to give up hand-loom weaving and to enter the cotton factory of Mr. Blackstock, an old Scotsman in Allegheny City, where we lived.  In this factory he also obtained for me a position as bobbin boy, and my first work was done there at one dollar and twenty cents per week.  It was a hard life.  In the winter father and I had to rise and breakfast in the darkness, reach the factory before it was daylight, and, with a short interval for lunch, work till after dark.  The hours hung heavily upon me and in the work itself I took no pleasure; but the cloud had a silver lining, as it gave me the feeling that I was doing something for my world—­our family.  I have made millions since, but none of those millions gave me such happiness as my first week’s earnings.  I was now a helper of the family, a breadwinner, and no longer a total charge upon my parents.  Often had I heard my father’s beautiful singing of “The Boatie Rows” and often I longed to fulfill the last lines of the verse: 

“When Aaleck, Jock, and Jeanettie, Are up and got their lair,[11] They’ll serve to gar the boatie row, And lichten a’ our care.”

[Footnote 11:  Education.]