ok at him. One night I sat in a corner, the picture
of dejection and despair, when a big, broad-shouldered man sat down
beside me.

"You look as if you thought God was dead!" he said, smiling.

"He appears to be," I replied.

He put his big hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes, and drew out
of me my story. I forget what he said, it was brief and perhaps
commonplace, but I went out to walk the streets that night, full of
hope and courage. Before leaving that night I approached the little
man at the employment desk.

"Did you see that big fellow in a gray suit?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Who is he?"

"Mr. McBurney."

"The man whose name is on your letterhead?"

"The same."

"Great guns! and to think that I've been monkeying all these weeks
with a man like you--pardon me, brother!"

Robert R. McBurney was my friend to the day of his death. Many a time,
when out of the pit, I reminded him of the incident. It was from the
little man at the employment desk of the Twenty-third Street Y.M.C.A.
that I got my real introduction to business life--if the vocation of a
porter can be called "business."

I became an under-porter in a wholesale house on Broadway at five
dollars a week, and spent a winter at the job. The head of the house
was a leader of national reputation in his particular denomination. I
was sitting on the radiator one winter's morning before the store was
opened when the chief clerk came in. It was a Monday morning, and his
first words were:

"Well, what did you do yesterday?"

"I taught a Bible Class, led a people's meeting, and preached once,"
was my reply. He looked dumbfounded.

"Do you do that often?" he asked.

"As often as I get a chance," I answered.

An abiding friendship began that morning between us. This man might
have been a member of the firm and a rich man by this time, but he had
a conscience, and it would not permit him to dishonestly keep books,
which his employers wanted him to do, and he quit.

My next job was running an elevator in an office building on West
Twenty-third Street. It was one of the old-fashioned, ice-wagon
variety, jerked up and down by a wire cable. It gave me a good
opportunity for study. In the side of the cage I had an arrangement
for my Greek grammar. This of course, could not escape the notice of
the business men, and if I was a few seconds late in answering their
bell, they always looked like a thunder-cloud in the direction of my
grammar. One of my pa