Page:The Wizard of Wall Street and his Wealth.djvu/30

 spare suit of clothes, and he had fifty cents in his pocket.

Young Jay trudged hopefully through the mountainous road between Roxbury and Hobart, where there was an academy that he had long desired to enter. He went directly to the principal of the academy and told him of his anxiety to obtain an education and his desire to get employment that he might earn money to pay the tuition fees. The principal became interested in the boy and secured for him the position of bookkeeper in a store kept by the village blacksmith. This school was kept by Mr. Oliver, and Jay's course there was completed in 1851. During this year, however, he must have made considerable progress in mathematics, in spite of the fact that it used to be related of him in the neighborhood that he grew tired once of going to school, and was locked up one morning in the cellar by his father as a measure of correction, and forgotten until his non-return in the evening caused comment. The taste for mathematics it was that opened up to him the first steadily lucrative employment in which he became engaged, and also led him, by easy steps, into the career which destiny seemed to have marked out for him.

On leaving school he got a place as a clerk in a tin shop in Hobart, and at fifteen years of age was a partner in and manager of the business. Not only that, but this amazing boy was up at daybreak every day to pursue the study of surveying and such engineering as he found books and instruments to help