"I ran all the way home," said Mr. Carnegie, in telling of the incident, long afterwards. "Talk about your millionaires! All the millions I've made combined, never gave me the happiness of that rise of $2.25 a month. Arrived at the cottage where we lived, I handed my mother the usual $11.25, and that night in bed told brother Tom the great secret. The next morning, Sunday, we were all sitting at the breakfast table, and I said: 'Mother, I have something else for you,' and then I gave her the $2.25, and told her how I got it. Father and she were delighted to hear of my good fortune, but, motherlike, she said I deserved it, and then came tears of joy." It was at the dinner given, in 1907, in his honor as "Father of the Corps," by the surviving members of the United States Military Telegraph Corps of the Civil War, that Mr. Carnegie spoke these words, and he continued as follows: "Comrades, I was born in poverty, and would not exchange its sacred memories with the richest millionaire's son who ever breathed. What does he know about mother or father? They are mere names to him. Give me the life of the boy whose mother is nurse, seamstress, washerwoman, cook, teacher, angel and saint, all in one, and whose father is guide, exemplar, and friend. These are the boys who are born to the best fortune. Some men think that poverty is a dreadful burden, and that wealth leads to happiness. They have lived only one side; they imagine the other. I have lived both, and I know there is very little in wealth that can add to human happiness, beyond the small comforts of life. Millionaires who laugh are rare. My experience is that wealth is apt to take the smiles away." But we are getting ahead of our story. That small increase in salary meant a good deal to the little family, whose father was working from dawn to dark in the cotton-mill, and whose mother was contributing what she could to the family earnings by binding shoes in the intervals of housework. Meantime the superintendent of the company for which the boy was working happened to meet him while visiting the Pittsburgh office, and it was discovered that both of them had been born near the same town in Scotland. The fact may have had something to do with the boy's subsequent promotion, and it is worth noting that forty years later, he was able to secure for his old employer the United States consulship to the town of their birth. But for the time being, he was busy with his work as messenger-boy. He soon learned the Morse alphabet and practised making the signals early in the morning before the operators arrived. He was soon able to send and receive messages by means of the Morse register--a steel pen which embossed the dots and dashes of the message on a narrow strip of paper. But young Carnegie soon progressed a step beyond this, and was soon able to read the messages by sound, without need of the register. It was, of course, only a short time after that when he was regularly installed as operator.