the boys of the neighborhood looking on none too kindly, or we did it to the echo of the crack of the ball and bat on the adjoining lot!

In the evening, when other could sit by the lamp or study their lessons, we two boys went out with a basket and picked up wood and coal in the neighboring lots, or went after the dozen or so pieces of coal left from the ton of coal put in that afternoon by one of our neighbors, with the spot hungrily fixed in mind by one of us during the day, hoping that the man who carried in the coal might not be too careful in picking up the stray lumps!

“An experience that you know not of”! Don’t I?

At ten years of age I got my first job: washing the windows of a baker’s shop at fifty cents a week. In a week or two I was allowed to sell bread and cakes behind the counter after school hours for a dollar a week—handing out freshly baked cakes and warm, delicious smelling bread, when scarcely a crumb had passed my mouth that day!

Then on Saturday mornings I served a route for a weekly paper, and sold my remaining stock on the street. It meant from sixty to seventy cents for that day’s work.

I lived in Brooklyn, New York, and the chief means of transportation to Coney Island at that time was the horse car. Near where we lived the cars would stop to water the horses, the men would jump out and get a drink of water, but the women had no means of quenching their thirst. Seeing this lack I got a pail, filled it with water and a bit of ice, and, with a glass, jumped on each car on Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday, and sold my wares at a cent a glass. And when competition came, as it did very quickly when other boys saw that a Sunday’s work meant two or three dollars, I squeezed a lemon or two in my pail, my liquid became “lemonade” and my price two cents a glass, and Sundays meant five dollars to me.

Then, in turn, I became a reporter during the evenings, an office boy day-times, and learned stenography at midnight!

My correspondent says she supports her family of husband and child on eight hundred dollars a year, and says I have never known what that means. I supported a family of three on six dollars and twenty-five cents a week—less than one half of her yearly income. When my brother and I, combined, brought in eight hundred dollars a year we felt rich!

I have for the first time gone into these details in print so that my readers may know, at first hand, that the

Editor of the “Ladies’ Home Journal” is not a theorist when he writes or prints articles that seek to preach economy or that reflect a hand-to-hand struggle on a small or an invisible income. There is not a single step, not an inch, on the road of direst poverty that I do not know or have not experienced. And, having experienced every thought, every feeling, and every hardship that come to those who travel that road, I say to-day that I rejoice with every boy who is going through the same experiences.

Nor am I discounting or forgetting one single pang of the keen hardships that such a struggle means. I would not to-day exchange my years of the keenest hardship that a boy can know or pass through for any single experience that could have come to me. I know what it means, not to earn a dollar, but to earn two cents. I know the value of money as I could have learned it or known it in no other way. I could have been trained for my life-work in no surer way. I could not have arrived at a truer understanding of what it means to face a day without a penny in hand, not a loaf of bread in the cupboard, not a piece of kindling wood for the fire—with nothing to eat, and then be a boy with the hunger of nine and ten, with a mother frail and discouraged!

“An experience that you know not of”! Don’t I?

And yet I rejoice in the experience, and I repeat: I envy every boy who is in that condition and going through it. But—and here is the pivot of my strong belief in poverty as an undisguised blessing to a boy—I believe in poverty as a