Daily Republican

Or What a Boy May Accomplish If He Does Start Poor.

While in Chicago and wandering around its spacious streets, beholding its busy thousands, its architectural wonders, and admiring its street after street of panoramic piles of beauty in everything from her most exquisitely fine ladies to the towering fingers of progressiveness pointing heavenward to their greatness as a people, we beheld a sign. It was a plain sign, but mammoth lettering on the walls of a mammoth brick building covering an entire block. The last name on the sign was one we had not read for a long time; it was a name familiar to us away back in the buoyant days of our youth (and beauty). We wondered if the owner could be the only one we ever knew who bore such a name. we entered the establishment. Everything was on the immense order.

A hundred feet away we saw a young gentleman moving around in an immense counting-room, barred from the show-room, through which we were approaching him, by heavy counters. The young gentleman resembled a rat's tail in a quart cup, so extensive the counting-room, while the man was of more than of the ordinary build of mortals. We questioned him. He was an intelligent young gentleman, and promptly answered our interrogatories.

We were right, the first letter of the name was "Harry." He had come from Delaware, had been a poor boy, was so high, had light hair—a good looking fellow; but he was not in. We left our card, and as we walked to the front to leave, without seeing the friend of our youth, a gentleman drove up in a handsome buggy with one of the handsomest of the Alderney cow colored horses it has been our privilege to behold for years. The young gentleman called us back.

The proprietor of the name and the co proprietor of the immense works, standing before us, had come.

We were invited back to the counting room, where we met a man, and after a few words of explanation, the boys of many years ago—ere the one had become gray as a badger and the other as hairless as a billiard-ball—were 'stirring up each other's pure minds by way of remembrance,'' faster than an auctioneer ever painted the beauties of a snide chromo.

We are delighted with the success of our former townsman and the companion of our earlier years. He had mastered an honorable calling, became a good mechanic, was industrious, honest, temperate and frugal; began life poor, gained the friendship of those, who like himself, had push and nerve; and to-day Harry Burgie is half owner of one of the prided establishments of the great West, and particularly of enterprising Chicago, in the Mammoth stove foundry of Messrs Collins & Burgie, covering one entire block, between Clinton and Jefferson, near Harrison street.
They employ in the busy season a vast number of men, and have a property worth several hundred thousands of dollars. Their trade extends in all directions, and the finest castings we have seen in many years, we found in their shops. Everything is systematized, and the mark of care and prompt business quality in the boy and young man is manifested by the perfect order reigning in their establishment. Among the novelties we saw while passing through the long range of shops and warehouses, was a stove they have been devoting some attention to, and used in Kansas and other Western States and Territories for the purpose of using hay as a fuel.