ing and went up naked to a farmhouse and told the folks that the other boys had swiped my clothes and I was due home three hours ago. They laughed at first; then a motherly woman went into the house and fetched me out some old duds one of her brood had outgrown. She said I needn't bother to bring them back, they weren't worth it. They were worth a lot to me, because, you see, they represented my whole capital for a start in life on my own.
Well, I drifted around for a few years, doing the things that most homeless kids do, I suppose, and finally I got a billet as cabin-boy on a yacht. That led to steward, and then the family took me into their town house as butler. It was a low-grade, flash crowd with barrels of money and all as crooked as a switch-back railway, men and women both, so that one fine night when a second-story worker handed me a proposition for opening the back door I said, "All right, matey, on one condition—that you share up even and then teach me the trade!"
That was how I started my professional career. Before that I'd only been an amateur, like a good many butlers and chauffeurs and the like. Ever feel any compunctions? Nary one! There are two emotions that never touched me; one is scruple and the other fear. Good workers go down under both sometimes, and if I had been with real swell people at the start it might have been different. But where the boss of the house buncoes his guests at bridge and brags of it afterward to his wife, before the butler, there ain't much of an example set to the service. More than that, everybody was always saying to me, just as you did a little while ago, "You look like a
