With quivering lip and uncertain feet he picked his way from room to
room until he came to what were once his father, mother and baby sister,
and then he swooned away. When he awoke he was shivering with cold. For
a moment he did not realize what had happened, then with a heartbreaking
cry he fled the place, nor did he stop until he was a league away.

He crept under the sheltering eaves of a half-burned house, and cold
and miserable he sobbed himself to sleep. In the morning an itinerant
tinker came by and touched by the child's distress, drew from him his
unhappy story. He was a lonely old man, and offered to take Ben with
him, an offer which was gladly accepted.

We will not chronicle the wanderings of these two in pursuit of food and
shelter, for it would take too long to tell in sequence how they finally
reached America, of the tinker's death, and of the evolution of the
tinker's pack to the well ordered hardware shop over which Philip lived.



CHAPTER IX

PHILIP BEGINS A NEW CAREER


After sifting the offers made him, Philip finally accepted two, one from
a large New York daily that syndicated throughout the country, and one
from a widely read magazine, to contribute a series of twelve articles.
Both the newspaper and the magazine wished to dictate the subject matter
about which he was to write, but he insisted upon the widest latitude.
The sum paid, and to be paid, seemed to him out of proportion to the