when his father became too sick to work, and his mother had to leave
"her two men" home together and go out and do such work as she could.
This consisted largely in reading to old ladies in the neighborhood,
though sometimes she had to do fancy needlework and sometimes take in
washing. Of these last achievements she was justly proud, though it made
Henry Blaine wince with shame.

Joe was only six years old when his father died, and from then on he and
his mother fought it out together. The boy entered the public school on
Seventy-ninth Street, and grew amazingly, his mind keeping pace. He was
a splendid absorber of good books; and his mother taught him her poets
and they went through English literature together.

Yorkville sprang up, a rubber-stamped neighborhood, of which each street
was a brownstone duplicate of the next. The rocky hill became valuable
and went for twenty thousand dollars, of which three thousand had to be
deducted for the mortgage. Then Joe graduated from high school, and,
lusting for life, took a clerk's job with one of the big express
companies. He held this for two years, and learned an interesting
fact--namely, that a clerk's life began at 5 P.M. and ended at 8.30 A.M.
In between the clerk was a dead but skilled machine that did the work of
a child. He learned, besides, that advancement was slow and only for a
few, and he saw these few, men past middle life, still underlings. A man
of forty-five with a salary of three thousand was doing remarkably well,
and, as a rule, he was a dried-up, negative, timid creature.

Out of all this he went like a stick of dynamite, took the seventeen
thousand dollars and went into his father's business of printing. Joe
was shrewd, despite his open nature; he never liked to be "done"; and so
he made money and made it fast. Besides his printing he did some