Moreover, I knew a way to pick up coppers. On a nearby corner in the Bowery a great auction of horses was going. Being light and little, and having besides a lively inclination for horses, I was thrown upon the backs of ones put up for sale to show their paces. For each of these mounts I came the better off by five cents, and on lucky days have made as much as the half of a dollar at that trade. As for a bed, if it were summer time, what should be finer than the docks? Or if winter, then the fire-rooms of the tugs, with the engineers and stokers whereof I made it my care to be friendly? I was always ready to throw off a line, or polish a lantern, or, when a tug was at the wharf, run to the nearest tap-room and fetch a pail of beer; for which good deeds the East River went thickly dotted of my allies before ever I touched the age of ten. These meager etchings give some picture of what was my earlier life, the major share of which I ran wild about the streets. Neither my father nor my mother lived in any command of me, and the parish priest failed as dismally as did they when he sought to confine my conduct to a rule. That hickory-wielding dominie, with his sandbox and alphabet, was a priest; and he gave me such a distaste of the clergy that I rolled away from their touch like quicksilver. Anne's tears and the soft voice of her were what I feared, and so I kept as much as possible beyond their spell. Coming now to a day when I began first to consider existence as a problem serious, I must tell you how my lone sole claim to eminence abode in the fact that, lung and limb, I was as strong and tireless as any bison or any bear. It was my capital, my one virtue, the mark that set me above my fellows. This story of vast strength sounds the more strange, since I was under rather than above the common height, and never, until when in later life I took on a thickness of fat, scaled heavier than one hundred and forty pounds. Thus it stood, however, that my muscle strength, even as a youth, went so far beyond what might be called legitimate that it became as a proverb in the mouths of people. The gift was a kind of genius; I tell of it particularly because it turned to be the ladder whereby I climbed into the first of my fortunes. Without it, sure, I never would have lifted myself above the gutter levels of my mates, nor fingered a splinter of those millions that now lie banked and waiting to my name and hand. CHAPTER II--THE BOSS MEETS WITH POLITICS