"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 passengers on that elevator was sympathetic. His name was Bruce Price, an architect; a tall, fine, powerfully built man, who had a kindly word for me every morning, and the only passenger who ever deigned to shake hands with me as if I were a human being.