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