he was less than three years old, and before he could speak plainly, he declaimed the verses beginning,

"You'd scarce expect one of my age

To speak in public on the stage,"

so often that he became heartily sick of the lines, and never again became reconciled to them during his whole life. Very early in life he was also able to repeat from memory whole books of both the Old and the New Testament.

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It is related of him that in order that he might pursue his studies by night, he would gather large numbers of pine-knots, by the light of which in the fire-place, as he lay prone on the floor, he would read for hours until actually driven to bed, in fact — utterly oblivious of what might be going on about him. After going to bed he would keep his brother awake for a good long hour with accounts of all the matters and things he had been reading about.

The only sport, perhaps, in which he took any real delight during these early years in New Hampshire, was fishing, and in this he was more expert than any of the boys of the neighbourhood. And even fishing was rather work than sport to him. "When I go a-fishing," he used to say, "I go a-fishing, and not funning." He was almost always unusually successful, catching more fishes than all his companions together.

The years Horace Greeley lived in New Hampshire were passed in a community of democrats. In Amherst, Bedford, and Londonderry there was no caste of any kind in those days. Perhaps the most notable illustration of the difference between plain and "company" days, was that, on great occasions, guests expected to be treated to wheaten bread, whereas the usual staff of life was bread made of cornmeal or rye flour. The absence of all social distinctions is shown by the fact. related by Mr. Greeley years afterwards, that when for a single year his New Hampshire home echoed to the steps of a female "help," she always ate with the family, even when they had the neighbours as "company;" and she had her party, and invited the girls of the neighbourhood to be her guests at tea, just as though she were a daughter of the house. The richest man

in the whole neighbourhood was not worth more than $3,000. Hospitality had become less bounteous, Mr. Greeley asserts, and kinship less prized, than in the days of the Scotch-Irish pioneers; but there was still much visiting of relatives and social enjoyment, especially in winter, when hundreds returned to the old Londonderry hive from the younger swarms scattered all over the East; not a few from as far away as Western New York. Zaccheus Greeley's latch-string was always out; "and a free liver," his distinguished son remarks with characteristic drollery, "with twelve brothers and sisters, to say nothing of their partners by marriage and their children, is not apt to be persistently shunned." The father of Horace Greeley was as proud as he was poor, and as generous as he was proud. The social requirements of the times and neighbourhood, perfectly unexclusive, democratic as they were, surpassed his means to afford. And now debts began to press upon him with greater and greater burden; until, in 1820, he reached the zero point of personal finances and credit, and was forced to witness the sad spectacle of his wife and little ones being sold out of house and home that his lawful obligations to pay might be satisfied, in the customary mode of sacrifice according to the forms of law.

СПАРТЕR II.

APPRENTICESHIP.

Removal of the Ruined Family to Vermont - Poverty of the Manly American Sort - Vermont Schools - Horace Keeps a Sort of Night School - An Omniverous Reader - "Clearing" Timber Lands-Flea Knoll - The Ague - A Respected Poor Family - Review of FarmerBoy Life Horace chooses the Printer's Trade - Apprenticeship at Poultney in the Northern Spectator Office - Dramatic Account of the Contract Family Remove to Western Pennsylvania - A Sad Parting-Horace as a Printer - An Authority in Politics and General Knowledge Anecdotes — An Excellent "Checker" Player — His Uncouth Toilet-Takes Down a "Swell"-Sends His Earnings Home - Journeys to Pennsylvania - First Essays in Writing — A Fugitive-Slave Chase - Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence — Learning a Trade Better than a College Education.

THE family catastrophe referred to at the close of the last chapter was the result of a variety of causes. Zaccheus Greeley's two years tenancy of the "Beard Farm" was disastrous in more ways than one. He was not paid, as he expected to be, for the improvements he made on the farm. His health failed, and for nearly a year he was unable to work. His brother, who had taken his own farm, did not prosper. It was a period of "hard times," that is, a period when almost all persons in community belong to the debtor class. He had added to his own indebtedness by rash indorsements, so that he owed about $1,000, which all he had would not have paid at the prices then current. The sad story of the complete downfall of the humble household can never be better told than in the words of the Great Editor himself:

We had finished our summer tillage and our haying, when a very heavy rain set in, near the end of August. I think its second day was a Saturday; and still the rain poured till far into the night. Father was absent on business; but our mother gathered her little ones around her, and delighted us with stories and prospects of good things she purposed to do for us in the better days she hoped to see. Father did not return

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till after we children were fast asleep; and, when he did, it was with tidings that our ill fortune was about to culminate. I guess that he was scarcely surprised, though we young ones ruefully were, when, about sunrise on Monday morning, the sheriff and sundry other officials, with two or three of our principal creditors, appeared, and — first formally demanding payment of their claims-proceeded to levy on farm, stock, implements, household stuff, and nearly all our worldly possessions but the clothes we stood in. There had been no writ issued till then, of course, no trial, no judgment, - but it was a word and a blow in those days, and the blow first, in the matter of debt-collecting by legal process. Father left the premises directly, apprehending arrest and imprisonment, and was invisible all day; the rest of us repaired to a friendly neighbour's, and the work of levying went on in our absence. It were needless to add that all we had was swallowed up, and our debts not much lessened. Our farm, which had cost us $1,350, and which had been considerably improved in our hands, was appraised and set off to creditors at $500, out of which the legal costs were first deducted. A barn-full of rye, grown by us on another's land, whereof we owned an undivided half, was attached by a doctor, threshed out by his poorer customers by days' work on account, and sold; the net result being an enlargement of our debt, the grain failing to meet all the cost. Thus, when night fell, we were as bankrupt a family as well could be.

We returned to our devastated house; and the rest of us stayed there while father took a journey on foot westward, in quest of a new home. He stopped in the township of Hampton, Washington County, N. Y., and worked there two or three months with a Colonel Parker French, who tilled a noble farm, and kept tavern on the main road from Troy into western Vermont. He returned to us in due time, and, on the 1st of January, 1821, we all started in a hired two-horse sleigh, with the little worldly gear that was left us, for the township of Westhaven, Vermont, where father had hired, for $16 per annum, a small house, in which, after an intensely cold journey, we were installed three days later.1

The family of Zaccheus Greeley had now made the acquaintance of genuine poverty,-"not beggary, nor dependence, but the manly American sort." The value of their whole property, including even the clothes they wore, did not exceed $200; and as that sum had afterwards to be paid on old New Hampshire debts, their material possessions when they reached their new home were correctly represented by 0, with a credit for their few worldly goods in possession. "Yet," says Mr. Greeley, in his Recollections of this period of his busy life, we never needed nor ran into debt for anything; never were

'Recollections of a Busy Life, 49–50.

without meal, meat, and wood, and very rarely without money." The father went to chopping at fifty cents per day, and the children all attended school till spring, and this though there were no school-funds in those days, "and ratebills for four children made quite a hole in a gross income of $3 per week." The schools are spoken of as at this time rather better than those of New Hampshire at least on account of the longer duration of the terms. On account of the narrow range of studies, however, young Greeley was unable to make that considerable advance in knowledge which a more liberal curriculum would have provided for. And here, it may be said in passing, is an argument in favour of a generous system of instruction in our public schools that they might well heed who insist that the state has done its whole duty in the premises when it has provided for all the means of acquiring "the rudiments of an English education," whatever they may be. Whilst many are acquiring those "rudiments," others and these the best and brightest of our youth able to acquire the rudiments and much more besides. Why should these be kept hum-drumming the rudiments over and over again because of stupidity for which they are no wise responsible? Those who can only mark time have no right to keep in the ranks those who can march. It does not cost a penny more to the state to keep a boy at school during the school-going years who in that period can gain what is called "a good English education" and also no little knowledge of practical sciences, history, literature, than it does to keep a boy at school for the same period who will emerge at the end of it utterly befogged in the mists of vulgar fractions, and unable to "move on." There is neither reason nor economy in manacling bright heads to blockheads.

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Horace Greeley lived in Vermont with his father from January, 1821, up to the latter part of April, 1826, that is, from the time he was about ten years old until he was something over fifteen. This is, perhaps, the period of life when one's mind, as well as body, grows the most rapidly. It surely may be said to be the beginning of the period in which mental development is, on the average, the greatest. But so far as