I received ten dollars a month for acting as what was called key-boy, whose light duties were to take care of the state-room keys and attend the steward’s office. I had also the exclusive privilege of selling books and papers to the passengers. By favor I received a share of my wages in advance, and, adding my five coppers to the sum, I made my first investment in yellow-covered literature.
The steamer, which was a veritable floating palace, carried hundreds of passengers every trip, and I prospered. It was the custom of many people, in compliment to my diminutive size, or in disgust at their contents, to make me presents of their books, when they had read them, or tried to read them. Thus I had the good fortune to sell the same book two, three, and even four times over. I made ten and sometimes fifteen dollars a week in this way and in the legitimate merchandise of my books and papers.
Scarce seven moons from the time of my first flight from Buffalo, and my five coppers had increased to I know not how many dollars. When the steamer was laid up in the late autumn, I had money enough to keep me handsomely and send me to school all the next winter,—if, as shall be seen, fate, in the guise of disappointed affection, and a banjo, had not ordered otherwise.
It is just both to my natural and legal guardians to say here, that, when they saw me not only determined but able to support myself, they left me ever afterward quietly to my own devices. My necessities, therefore, and the prosperous result of my first adventures with five coppers, led me to adopt—a little too romantically, perhaps, in the latter and more thoughtful period of my youth—a principle to which I long had a kindly leaning, notwithstanding the hard knocks it dealt me. Indeed, it is still doubtful in my mind whether it is not better to devote half of one’s energies in learning to live on a very small income than to devote all of one’s energies in struggling and waiting miserably for a very large income.
That, at least, was my principle; and, if it trammelled the head with false doctrine, it left the soul remarkably free. Thus, it will be seen, my entire subsequent wanderings, my course at an American college, and at a German university—the former on nothing to speak of, and the latter on eighty dollars—all sprang more or less directly from the extraordinary qualities of expansion, both spiritual and financial, which, at the early age of eleven, I discovered in those five copper cents.
BOOK II.
THREE YEARS AS A NEGRO-MINSTREL.
Æt. 12-15.
CHAPTER I.
MY FIRST COMPANY.
NEGRO-MINSTRELS were, I think, more highly esteemed at the time of which I am about to write than they are now; at least, I thought more of them then, both as individuals and as ministers to public amusement, than I ever have since.