curious chances of fate, the very place in all the world
best suited to the development of young Andrew Carnegie's peculiar
genius.

At the age of twelve years, he became a wage-earner, his first position
being that of bobbin-boy in a cotton mill at Alleghany City, where his
salary was $1.20 a week. Pretty soon he was set to firing a small engine
in the cellar of the mill, but he did not like this work, and finally
secured a position as messenger boy in the office of the Atlantic & Ohio
Telegraph Company, at Pittsburgh. One night, at the end of the month, he
did not receive his pay with the rest of the boys, but was told to wait
till the others had left the room. He thought that dismissal was coming,
and wondered how he could ever go home and tell his father and mother!
But he found that he was to be given an increase in salary, from $11.25
to $13.50 a month.

"I ran all the way home," said Mr. Carnegie, in telling of the incident,
long afterwards. "Talk about your millionaires! All the millions I've
made combined, never gave me the happiness of that rise of $2.25 a
month. Arrived at the cottage where we lived, I handed my mother the
usual $11.25, and that night in bed told brother Tom the great secret.
The next morning, Sunday, we were all sitting at the breakfast table,
and I said: 'Mother, I have something else for you,' and then I gave her
the $2.25, and told her how I got it. Father and she were delighted to
hear of my good fortune, but, motherlike, she said I deserved it, and
then came tears of joy."

It was at the dinner given, in 1907, in his honor as "Father of the
Corps," by the surviving members of the United States Military Telegraph
Corps of the Civil War, that Mr. Carnegie spoke these words, and he
continued as follows:

"Comrades, I was born in poverty, and would not exchange its sacred
memories with the richest millionaire's son who ever breathed. What does
he know about mother or father? They are mere names to him. Give me the
life of the boy whose mother is nurse, seamstress, washerwoman, cook,
teacher, angel and saint, all in one, and whose father is guide,
exemplar, and friend. These are the boys who are born to the best
fortune. Some men think that poverty is a dreadful burden, and that
wealth leads to happiness. They have lived only one side; they imagine
the other. I have lived both, and I know there is very little in wealth
that can add to human happiness, beyond the small comforts of life.