As soon as we landed in Sharon I started out to earn money. Those feather beds were on my mind and I couldn't rest easy until we should replace them. Neither could the rest of the family. I have often told how I scraped up some capital and invested it in a shoe-shining outfit. Nearly every traveling man who came to the hotel allowed me to shine his shoes. The townsfolk let their shoes go gray all week, but the gay commercial travelers all were dudes and dressed like Sunday every day. They brought the new fashions to town and were looked upon as high-toned fellows. Their flashy get-up caught the girls, which made the town-boys hate them. But I liked them very well because they brought me revenue. “Where a man's treasure is, there is his heart also,” says the proverb, and my experience proved it true. On my first visit to the hotel I got acquainted with the landlord and he put me on his pay-roll. Behind the hotel was a cow pen where the milk for the guests was drawn fresh from the cows. The cows had to be driven to a pasture in the morning and back at night. I got a dollar and a quarter a month for driving the cows. And so I had found a paying job within thirty days after landing in America. The cost of pasturage was a dollar a month for each cow. That was less than four cents a day for cow feed to produce two gallons of milk, or about two cents a gallon. The wages of the girls who milked them and my wages for driving them amounted to three cents a gallon. In other words, the cost of labor in getting the milk from the cows more than doubled the cost of the milk. This was my first lesson in political economy. I learned that labor costs are the chief item in fixing the price of anything. The less labor used in producing milk, the cheaper the milk will be. The reason wages were high in America was because America was the land of labor-saving machinery. Little labor was put on any product, and so the product was cheap, like the landlord's milk. In the iron industry, for instance, the coal mines and iron ore lay near the mills, as the landlord's pasture was near his hotel. To bring the coal and ore to the blast furnaces took little labor, just as my driving in the cows cost the landlord but four cents a day. Next to the blast furnaces stood the mixer, the Bessemer open hearth furnaces, the ingot stripper building, the soaking pits and then the loading yards with their freight cars where the finished product in the form of wire, rails or sky-scraper steel is shipped away.