With the exception of some private capital amassed by abstaining from butter (a method of creating a fortune of whose wisdom, I must say, I had the same doubts then that I have now), this was the first money I had ever earned. The sum was two dollars and a half. It became my immediate purpose not to squander this wealth. I had no spending money in particular that I recall. Three cents a week was, I believe, for years the limit of my personal income, and I am compelled to own that this sum was not expended at book-stalls, or for the benefit of the heathen who appealed to the generosity of professors' daughters through the treasurer of the chapel Sunday-school; but went solidly for cream cakes and apple turnovers alternately, one each week.
VIEW FROM THE WESTERN WINDOW OF THE STUDY IN PROFESSOR AUSTIN PHELPS'S HOUSE, ANDOVER, MASSACHUSETTS.
Two dollars and a half represented to me a standard of munificent possession which it would be difficult to make most girls in their first teens, and socially situated today as I was then, understand. To waste this fortune in riotous living was impossible. From the hour that I received that check for "two-fifty," cream cakes began to wear a juvenile air, and turnovers seemed unworthy of my position in life. I remember begging to be allowed to invest the sum "in pictures," and that my father, gently diverting my selection from a frowsy and popular "Hope" at whose memory I shudder even yet, induced me to find that I preferred some excellent photographs of Thorwaldsen's "Night" and "Morning," which he framed for me, and which hang in our rooms to-day.
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner. The humorous side of it is the least of it—or was in my case. I felt that I had suddenly acquired value—to myself, to my family, and to the world.
Probably all people who write "for a living" would agree with me in recalling the first check as the largest and most luxurious of life.