“At small wages, I suppose.”
“One dollar and twenty cents a week was what I received as a bobbin
boy, and I can tell you that I considered it pretty good, at that. When
I was thirteen, I had learned to run a steam engine, and for that I
received a dollar and eighty cents a week.”
“You had no early schooling, then?”
“None, except such as I gave myself. There were no fine libraries then,
but in Allegheny City, where I lived, there was a certain Colonel
Anderson, who was well to do and of a philanthropic turn. He announced
about the time I first began to work, that he would be in his library
at his home, every Saturday, ready to lend books to working boys and
men. He only had about four hundred volumes, but I doubt if ever so few
books were put to better use. Only he who has longed, as I did, for
Saturday to come, that the spring of knowledge might be opened anew to
him, can understand what Colonel Anderson did for me and others of the
boys of Allegheny. Quite a number of them have risen to eminence, and
I think their rise can be easily traced to this splendid opportunity.”
“How long did you remain an engine boy?”
“Not very long,” Mr. Carnegie replied, “perhaps a year.”
“And then?”
“I entered a telegraph office as a messenger boy.”
Although Mr. Carnegie would not dwell much on this period, he once
described it at a dinner given in honor of the American Consul at
Dunfermline, Scotland, when he said—
“I awake from a dream that has carried me away back in the days of my
boyhood, the day when the little white-haired Scottish laddie, dressed
in a blue jacket, walked with his father into the telegraph office in
Pittsburg to undergo examination as an applicant for a position as
messenger boy.