I early inquired the rate
of interest on invested money, and worried my child's brain into an
understanding of the virtues and excellences of that remarkable
invention of man, compound interest. Further, I ascertained the
current rates of wages for workers of all ages, and the cost of
living. From all this data I concluded that if I began immediately
and worked and saved until I was fifty years of age, I could then
stop working and enter into participation in a fair portion of the
delights and goodnesses that would then be open to me higher up in
society. Of course, I resolutely determined not to marry, while I
quite forgot to consider at all that great rock of disaster in the
working-class world--sickness.
But the life that was in me demanded more than a meagre existence of
scraping and scrimping. Also, at ten years of age, I became a
newsboy on the streets of a city, and found myself with a changed
uplook. All about me were still the same sordidness and
wretchedness, and up above me was still the same paradise waiting to
be gained; but the ladder whereby to climb was a different one.
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