As for Isaac, whom hard necessity, or, more probably, a mistaken thrift, likewise forced away from school when not much more than ten years old, his earliest ventures bear a curious symbolic likeness to his latest.  He earned his first wages in the service of a religious periodical, the Methodist publication still known as Zion’s Herald, whose office was situated in Crosby Street near Broadway.  From there he went to learn a trade in the type foundry in Great Thames Street.  But as it was already apparent that the family road to prosperity was identical with that chosen by his elder brothers, we find him working away beside them in the bake-house by the time he was eleven.  They had already established the bakery in Rutgers Street, between Monroe and Cherry, where the family lived for so many years.  They had another shop in Pearl Street, to which Isaac used to carry bread every morning.

This was a part of his life to which he was fond of recurring in his last years.  “Thanks be to God!” he said on the first day of 1886, “how hard we used to work preparing for New Year’s Day!  Three weeks in advance we began to bake New Year’s cakes—­flour, water, sugar, butter, and caraway seeds.  We never could make enough.  How I used to work carrying the bread around in my baker’s cart!  How often I got stuck in the gutters and in the snow!  Sometimes some good soul, seeing me unable to get along, would give me a lift.  I began to work when I was ten and a half years old, and I have been at it ever since.”

And again, a few days later, as a poor woman carrying a heavy basket passed him in the street, he said to the companion of his walk:  “I have had the blood spurt out of my arm carrying bread when I was a baker.  A lady asked me once for a hundred dollars to help her send her only son to college.  I answered her that my mother had four children and got along without begging, and that I would not exchange one year of those I spent working for several at college.”

Less than a month before his death he fell into conversation with a newsboy on the corner near the Paulist church in Fifty-ninth Street.  “It interested me very much,” he said afterwards.  “I found out that he is one of five little brothers, and their mother is a widow.  She is trying to bring them up, poor thing!  It reminds me of my own mother.”

It is plain that there could not have been much room for formal study in a life of hard physical labor, so soon begun and so unremittingly continued during the years usually given up to school work.  An ordinary boy, placed in such circumstances, would doubtless have grown up ignorant and unformed.  But while none of the Hecker boys was quite of the ordinary stamp, Isaac was distinctly sui generis and individual.  He has said of himself that he could remember no period of his life when he had not the consciousness of having been sent into the world for some especial purpose.  What it was he knew not, but expectation and desire for the withheld knowledge kept him pondering and self-withdrawn.  Once in his childhood he was given over for death with a bad attack of confluent small-pox, and his mother came to his bedside to tell him so.  “No, mother,” he answered her, “I shall not die now.  God has a work for me to do in the world, and I shall live to do it.”