Dave Ranney | Page 8

building where I
worked--No. 9 Exchange Place, Jersey City--and found the door locked.
I waited around for a while, for I thought my employer wanted his
clothes or he would not have sent me for them. Finally I got tired of
waiting, and after trying the door once more and finding it still locked,
I said to myself, "I'll just put these clothes in the furniture store next
door and I'll get them to-morrow morning." I left them and told the man
I would call for them in the morning, and started for home.
I was in bed dreaming of Indians and other things, when mother
wakened me, shouting, "Where's the man's clothes?" I couldn't make
out at first what all the racket was about. Then I heard men's voices
talking in the yard, and recognized Mr. M., my Sunday-school teacher,
and my employer, the man that was going to make a great engineer out

of me. I went out on the porch and told him what I had done with the
clothes, and he nearly collapsed. He was very angry, and drove off,
saying, "You come to the office and get what's due you in the
morning." I went the next morning, got my money, and bade him
good-by. That was the last of my becoming one of the great engineers
of the day.
I was glad, and I went back to school determined to study real hard, and
I did remain in school for a year. Then the old craze for work came on
me again. Father had died in the meantime, and mother was left to do
the best she could, and I got a job with the determination to be a help to
her.
AT WORK AGAIN
I got a position as office boy at 40 Broadway, then one of New York's
largest buildings. The man I worked for was a commission merchant, a
Hebrew, and one of the finest men I ever met in my life. He took me
into his private office and we had a long talk, a sort of fatherly talk, as
he had sons and daughters of his own. I loved that man. I had been
brought up among the Dutch and Irish, and had never associated with
the Jews, and I supposed from what I had heard that they were put on
earth for us to get the best of, fire stones at, and treat as meanly as we
could. That was my idea of a Jew--my boy idea. Yet here was a man, a
Jew, one of the whitest men I ever met, who by his life changed
completely my opinion of the Jews, and I put them down from that day
as being pretty good people.
My mother did some work for his wife, and when he heard that I
wanted to go to work he told her to send me over to his place of
business, and that is how I got my second position in this big world.
I went to work with the determination to make a man of myself, and
mother said:
"Now, Dave, be a good boy, and one of these days you will be a big
merchant and I shall be proud of you." That was what I might have
been if I had had the grace of God to make my life true. I am

acquainted with some men to-day that started about the same time I did.
They were boys that looked ahead, studied and went up step by step,
and are to-day some of the best-known bankers in America.
They say "Hell is paved with good intentions," and I believe it is. We
start out in life with the best intentions, but before we know it we are
up against some temptation, and unless we have God with us we are
sure to fall, and when we fall, why, it's the hardest thing in the world to
get back where we tumbled from. I only wish I had taken the Saviour as
my helper years ago. Oh! what a change He did make in my life after I
did accept Him, seventeen years ago!
I started in to work at four dollars a week, and, as I said, I intended to
be a great merchant. I meant well, if that was any consolation. My
duties were to go to the postoffice and bring the mail, copy the letters,
and run errands, and I was happy.
I was out one day on an errand, when whom should I meet but my old
friend Mike ----, my chum of the pig incident. He said, "Hello, Dave,
where are you working?" He had a job in a factory in Maiden Lane, at
the same wages I was getting. I hadn't seen much of Mike