book-keeper, where he is now. This was in 1826. My duties consisted in helping William Chapman softly draw his coat over his rheumatic shoulders, and going to the Post Office, and copying letters. I told Mr. Chapman that I had to pay two dollars a week for board, and that he must increase my salary, or I could not remain. He said that he could get a boy for less than two dollars a week, and I left him, and got a place with two brothers, named Morton, in Front street, for two dollars and twenty-five cents a week. While passing the sailor hat store of Mr. Leary, Mr. Leary’s mother called me into the store, and said: “Little boy, if you will take this bottle, and go to the grocery and get me some gin, I will give you some pennies.” When I returned with the gin, she asked me if I would like to be a clerk for Mr. Leary. I said that I would come for my board and clothes. She told me to call in the evening and arrange the compensation with Mr. Leary, who would then be in the store. I did so, and on the following day I told the Messrs. Morton that I must leave them, as two dollars and twenty-five cents a week could not buy my food and clothes, and pay for washing my two shirts and two pairs of stockings. Mr. Leary, his wife, mother, children, and myself, were packed like pork in two small rooms in the rear of the store, which were used as kitchens, bed-rooms, parlors, wash-rooms and everything else, which rendered the atmosphere slightly dense and foggy, and perhaps impure, and in the night we often had skull collisions, and tumbled over each other, which strongly resembled a rough and tumble cabin scene in a terrific storm. I might have endured all this, but to make fires, open store, sell hats to drunken sailors, run errands, and take care of squalling children, so taxed my patience, and wasted my pale and naturally delicate form, that I resolved to leave instanter, and, with the Pilgrim’s heavy burden, away I flew in pursuit of employment. Mr. Leary now keeps a hat store in the Astor House, whose boys are wealthy merchants in Exchange Place, whom I often remind of the days when I bore them in my arms, and spanked them when they squalled. From Leary’s I went to the Harpers in Cliff street, and was placed in the pressing and folding room, in the upper story. I boarded with Fletcher (the youngest of the Harpers) in Batavia street, between James and Roosevelt. The firm then consisted of John, James, and Wesley Harper. Fletcher was the foreman of the composing room, (where I was ultimately placed), who corrected my earliest errors in the printer’s stick—and a precious job he had of it—consuming more of his valuable time than my composition was worth. Fletcher was a fireman, and recently married, and rather wild, and had two children, one of whom was the partner of Raymond, Wesley and Jones, of the “_New York Daily Times_,” at the origin of that Journal, whom I often fondled in my arms in his infancy, who was a very pretty child, though