and let me go with him and learn the business. I soon found
opportunity to run down to the corner of the street and tell my father
that it was all right, and to go home and tell mother that I had got
the situation.

[Illustration: DAVID McCARGO]

And that is how in 1850 I got my first real start in life. From the
dark cellar running a steam-engine at two dollars a week, begrimed
with coal dirt, without a trace of the elevating influences of life, I
was lifted into paradise, yes, heaven, as it seemed to me, with
newspapers, pens, pencils, and sunshine about me. There was scarcely a
minute in which I could not learn something or find out how much there
was to learn and how little I knew. I felt that my foot was upon the
ladder and that I was bound to climb.

I had only one fear, and that was that I could not learn quickly
enough the addresses of the various business houses to which messages
had to be delivered. I therefore began to note the signs of these
houses up one side of the street and down the other. At night I
exercised my memory by naming in succession the various firms. Before
long I could shut my eyes and, beginning at the foot of a business
street, call off the names of the firms in proper order along one side
to the top of the street, then crossing on the other side go down in
regular order to the foot again.

The next step was to know the men themselves, for it gave a messenger
a great advantage, and often saved a long journey, if he knew members
or employees of firms. He might meet one of these going direct to his
office. It was reckoned a great triumph among the boys to deliver a