I wanted to be a real boss puddler, and so, when I was eighteen I went to Pittsburgh and got a furnace. But a new period of hard times was setting in, jobs were getting scarce as they had been in 1884. That was the year when we had no money in the house and I was chasing every loose nickel in town. The mill at Sharon was down, and father was hunting work in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. Then after a period of prosperity the hard times had come again in 1891 and '92. My furnace job in Pittsburgh was not steady. The town was full of iron workers and many of them were in desperate need. Those who had jobs divided their time with their needy comrades. A man with hungry children would be given a furnace for a few days to earn enough to ward off starvation. I had no children and felt that I should not hold a furnace. I left Pittsburgh and went to Niles, Ohio, where I found less competition for the jobs. I worked a few weeks and the mill shut down. I wandered all over the iron district and finally, deciding that the North held no openings, I began working my way toward the iron country in the South. The Sharon mill did not shut down completely. The owner operated it at a loss rather than throw all his old hands out on the world. Twenty years later I met him on a train in the West and we talked of old times when I worked in his mill. As long as he lived he was loved and venerated by his former employees. Father was putting in short time at Sharon and was badly worried. He was thinking of setting out again to go from town to town looking for work, but I had advised him against it. I had told him that he would merely find crowds of idle men roaming from mill to mill along with him. My brothers gave him similar advice. “Father,” we said, “it is a time of business depression and wide-spread unemployment. If you went to Pittsburgh you might find a few weeks' work, but it would not pay you to go there for it. You would have to lay out cash for your board and lodging there before you could send anything home to mother. Keeping up two establishments is harder than keeping up one. You have a home here partly paid for, and a big garden that helps support that home. It is better for you to stick with this establishment and work at half time in the mill than to roam around at big expense seeking full time in some other mill. There may be no mill in the land that is running full time.” This had not occurred to him. What lay beyond the hills was all mystery. But we young fellows had been brought up in the American atmosphere, we had read the Youth's Companion and the newspapers, and our outlook was widened; we could guess that conditions were the same in other states as they were in our part of Pennsylvania, for we were studying economic causes.