Millionaires who laugh are rare. My experience is that wealth is apt to
take the smiles away."

But we are getting ahead of our story. That small increase in salary
meant a good deal to the little family, whose father was working from
dawn to dark in the cotton-mill, and whose mother was contributing what
she could to the family earnings by binding shoes in the intervals of
housework. Meantime the superintendent of the company for which the boy
was working happened to meet him while visiting the Pittsburgh office,
and it was discovered that both of them had been born near the same
town in Scotland. The fact may have had something to do with the boy's
subsequent promotion, and it is worth noting that forty years later, he
was able to secure for his old employer the United States consulship to
the town of their birth. But for the time being, he was busy with his
work as messenger-boy. He soon learned the Morse alphabet and practised
making the signals early in the morning before the operators arrived. He
was soon able to send and receive messages by means of the Morse
register--a steel pen which embossed the dots and dashes of the message
on a narrow strip of paper. But young Carnegie soon progressed a step
beyond this, and was soon able to read the messages by sound, without
need of the register. It was, of course, only a short time after that
when he was regularly installed as operator.

He was not to remain long in the telegraph business, however, for Thomas
A. Scott, superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania
Railroad, offered him a position at a salary of $35 a month. Carnegie
promptly accepted, and on February 1, 1853, at the age of seventeen,
entered the employ of the road. His promotion was rapid, and he rose to
be superintendent of the Pittsburgh division before the success of his
other ventures caused him to resign from the service. These ventures
were, in the first place, investment in the newly-developed oil-fields
of Pennsylvania, which yielded a great profit, and afterwards the
establishment of a steel rolling-mill, in the development of which he
found his true vocation, building up the most complete system of iron
and steel industries ever controlled by an individual. Some idea of the
value of the business may be gained from the fact that, when the United
States Steel Corporation was organized in 1901 to take over Mr.
Carnegie's interests he received for them, first mortgage bonds to the