Carnegie autobiography

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At one corner was seen the round stamp of Adams Express Company. And there my slight knowledge of British and European affairs soon stood me in good stead.

A new judge is very apt to stand so straight as really to lean a little backward. Among the first of these was my cousin, Miss Maria Hogan. I kept that "Tribune" for years. The ice was in splendid condition, and reaching home late Saturday night the question arose whether I might be permitted to rise early in the morning and go skating before church hours.

Any accurate description of Pittsburgh at that time would be set down as a piece of the grossest exaggeration. I do not know a situation in which a boy is more apt to attract attention, which is all a really clever boy requires in order to rise. Nor is that bell dumb to me to-day when I hear its voice. I received messages from the public and saw that those that came from the operating-room were properly assigned to the boys for prompt delivery.

This was a trying position for a boy to fill, and at that time I was not popular with the other boys, who resented my exemption from part of my legitimate work.

Wallace, of course, was our hero. My mother suffered so severely that in the morning she could hardly see. He was my great man and all the hero worship that is inherent in youth I showered upon him. He has a reply by this time that will warm his heart as his note did mine.][Pg 25]

With the introduction and improvement of steam machinery, trade grew worse and worse in Dunfermline for the small manufacturers, and at last a letter was written to my mother's two sisters in Pittsburgh stating that the idea of our going to them was seriously entertained—not, as I remember hearing my parents say, to benefit their own condition, but for the sake of their two young sons.

She was not much beyond my own age, but always seemed a great deal older. ere this he's gone aloft. The hotel at Greensburg was the first public house in which I had ever taken a meal. This brought me into such notice that when a great flood destroyed all telegraph communication between Steubenville and Wheeling, a distance of[Pg 62] twenty-five miles, I was sent to the former town to receive the entire business then passing between the East and the West, and to send every hour or two the dispatches in small boats down the river to Wheeling.