CHAPTER III.
HOW DID HE BEGIN?
There can be no doubt that the captains of industry to-day, using that term in its broadest sense, are men who began life as poor boys.
-- SETH LOW.
Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us, but it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.
-- OUIDA.
'Tis a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition's ladder -- SHAKESPEARE.
"Fifty years ago," said Hezekiah Conant, the millionaire manufacturer and philanthropist of Pawtucket, R.I., "I persuaded my father to let me leave my home in Dudley, Mass., and strike out for myself.

So one morning in May, 1845, the old farm horse and wagon was hitched up, and, dressed in our Sunday clothes, father and I started for Worcester.

Our object was to get me the situation offered by an advertisement in the Worcester County _Gazette_ as follows: BOY WANTED.
WANTED IMMEDIATELY .-- At the _Gazette_ Office, a well disposed boy, able to do heavy rolling.

Worcester, May 7.
"The financial inducements were thirty dollars the first year, thirty-five the next, and forty dollars the third year and board in the employer's family.

These conditions were accepted, and I began work the next day.