I just put by the price of a five-cent cigar every day, and as the money accumulated I bought books--the books you see there." "Do you mean to say that those books cost no more than that?
Why there are dollars' worth of them." "Yes, I know there are.

I had six years more of my apprenticeship to serve when you persuaded me to 'be a man.' I put by the money I have told you of, which of course at five cents a day amounted to $18.25 a year or $109.50 in six years.

I keep those books by themselves, as a result of my apprenticeship cigar-money; and if you'd done as I did, you would by this time have saved many, many more dollars than that, and been in business besides." If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents every working day, investing at 7 per cent.

compound interest, he will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old.

Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars.