The Master of Silence — Irving Bacheller

Near the end of my fourteenth year I was apprenticed to Valentine, King& Co., cotton importers, Liverpool, as a pair of legs. My father had died suddenly, leaving me and his property in the possession of my stepmother and my guardian. It was in deference to their urgent advice that I left my home in London (with little reluctance, since my life there had never been happy) to study the art of money-making