A boy whose stepfather has stolen his inheritance leaves the village for New York, takes a clerk's place, and works his way back to the proof he needs. Alger published dozens of these and the machinery is always the same; the interest is in what he reports along the way — wages, lodgings, fares, and the exact price of respectability. The villain is a swindler rather than a brute, which was Alger's real subject. Sixty plates by painters including Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer follow the boy from village hearth to city room, matching Alger's own account of what leaving home costs.
