"What sort of a place is Granton, where you come from?"
"It's a farming town. There isn't any village at all."
"There isn't much going on here."
"There'll be more than in Granton. There's nothing to do there but to work on a farm."
"I shouldn't like that myself; but the city's the best of all."
"Can you make more money in a store than working in a shoe shop?"
"Not so much at first, but after you've got learned there's better chances. There's a clerk, that went from here ten years ago, that gets fifty dollars a week."
"Does he?" asked Harry, to whose rustic inexperience this seemed like an immense salary. "I didn't think any clerk ever got so much."
"They get it often if they are smart," said Robert.
Here he was wrong, however. Such cases are exceptional, and a city fry goods clerk, considering his higher rate of expense, is no better off than many country mechanics. But country boys are apt to form wrong ideas on this subject, and are in too great haste to forsake good country homes for long hours of toil behind a city counter, and a poor home in a dingy, third-class city boarding house. It is only in the wholesale houses, for the most part, that high salaries are paid, and then, of course, only to those who have shown superior energy and capacity. Of course some do achieve success and become rich; but of the tens of thousand who come from the country to seek clerkships, but a very small proportion rise above a small income.