ed. They seem to have written and ciphered as much or as little as they chose, at what time they chose, and in what manner. Ir some schools there were classes in arithmetic and regular instruction in writing, and one class in grammar; but such schools, forty years ago, were rare. The exercises of the morning were concluded with a general spell, the teacher giving out the words from a spelling-book, and the pupils spelling them at the top of their voices. At noon the school was dismissed; at one it was summoned again, to go through, for the next three hours, precisely the same routine as that of the morning. In this rude way the last generation of children learned to read, write, and cipher. But they learned something more in those rude tchool-houses. They learned obedience. They were tamed and disciplined. The means employed were extremely unscientific, but the thing was done! The means, in fact, were merely a ruler, and what was called, in contradistinction to that milder weapon, "the heavy gad;" by which expression was designated five feet of elastic sapling of one year's growth. These two implements were plied vigorously and often. Girls got their full share of them. Girls old enough to be wives were no more exempt than the young men old enough to marry them, who sat on the other side of the schoolroom. It was thought, that if a youth of either sex was not too old to do wrong, neither he nor she was too old to suffer the consequences. In some districts, a teacher was valued in proportion to his severity; and if he were backward in applying the ferule and the "gad," the parents soon began to be uneasy. They thought he had no energy, and inferred that the children could not be learning much. In the district schools, then, of forty years ago, all the pupils learned to read and to obey; most of them learned to write; many acquired a competent knowledge of figures; a few learned the rudiments of grammar; and if any learned more than these, it was generally due to their unassisted and unencouraged exertions. There were no school-libraries at that time. The teachers usually possessed little general information, and the little they did possess was not often made to contribute to the mental nourishment of their pupils.

On one of the first benches of the Londonderry school-house, near the fire, we may imagine the little white-headed fellow, whom every body liked, to be seated during the winters of 1813-14 and '14-'15. He

was eager to go to school. When the snow lay on the ground in drifts too deep for him to wade through, one of his aunts, who still lives to tell the story, would take him up on her shoulders and carry him to the door. He was the possessor that winter, of three books, the "Columbian Orator," Morse's Geography, and a spelling book. From the Columbian Orator, he learned many pieces by heart, and among others, that very celebrated oration which probably the majority of the inhabitants of this nation have at some period of their lives been able to repeat, beginning,

"You'd scarce expect one of my age

To speak in public on the stage."

One of his schoolfellows has a vivid remembrance of Horace's reciting this piece before the whole school in Londonderry, before he was old enough to utter the words plainly. He had a lisping, whining little voice, says my informant, but spoke with the utmost confidence, and greatly to the amusement of the school. He spoke the piece so often in public and private, as to become, as it were, identified with it, as a man who knows one song suggests that song by his presence, and is called upon to sing it wherever he goes.

It is a pity that no one thinks of the vast importance of those "Orators" and reading books which the children read and wear out in reading, learning parts of them by heart, and repeating them over and over, till they become fixed in the memory and embedded in the character forever. And it is a pity that those books should contain so much false sentiment, inflated language, Buncombe oratory, and other trash, as they generally do! To compile a series of Reading Books for the common schools of this country, were a task for a conclave of the wisest and best men and women that ever lived; a task worthy of them, both from its difficulty and the incalculable extent of its possible results.

Spelling was the passion of the little orator during the first winters of his attendance at school. He spelt incessantly in school and out of school. He would lie on the floor at his grandfather's house, for hours at a time, spelling hard words, all that he could find in the Bible and the few other books within his reach. It was the

standing amusement of the family to try and puzzle the boy with words, and no one remembers succeeding. Spelling, moreover, was one of the great points of the district schools in those days, and he who could out-spell, or, as the phrase was, "spell down" the whole school, ranked second only to him who surpassed the rest in arithmetic. Those were the palmy days of the spellingschool. The pupils assembled once a week, voluntarily, at the school-house, chose "sides," and contended with one another long and earnestly for the victory. Horace, young as he was, was eager to attend the spelling school, and was never known to injure the "side" on which he was chosen by missing a word, and it soon became a prime object at the spelling-school to get the first choice, because that enabled the lucky side to secure the powerful aid of Horace Greeley. He is well remembered by his companions in orthography. They delight still to tell of the little fellow, in the long evenings, falling asleep in his place, and when it came his turn, his neighbors gave him an anxious nudge, and he would wake instantly, spell off his word, and drop asleep again in a moment.

Horace went to school three terms in Londonderry, spending part of each year at home. I will state as nearly as possible in their own words, what his school-fellows there remember of him.

One of them can just recall him as a very small boy with a head as white as snow, who "was almost always up head in his class, and took it so much to heart when he did happen to lose his place, that he would cry bitterly; so that some boys when they had gained the right to get above him, declined the honor, because it hurt Horace's feelings so." He was the pet of the school. Those whom he used to excel most signally liked him as well as the rest. He was an active, bright, eager boy, but not fond of play, and seldom took part in the sports of the other boys. One muster day, this informant remembers, the clergyman of Londonderry, who had heard glowing accounts of Horace's feats at school, took him on his lap in the field, questioned him a long time, tried to puzzle him with hard words, and concluded by saying with strong emphasis to one of the boy's relatives, "Mark my words, Mr. Woodburn, that boy was not made for nothing."

Another, besides confirming the above, adds that Horace was in some respects exceedingly brave, and in others exceedingly tim

The farm owned by Zaccheus Greeley when his son Horace was corn, was four or five miles from the village of Amherst. It consisted of fifty acres of land-heavy land to till-rocky, moist, and uneven, worth then eight hundred dollars, now two thousand. The house, a small, unpainted, but substantial and well-built farmhouse, stood, and still stands, upon a ledge or platform, half way up a high, steep, and rocky hill, commanding an extensive and almost panoramic view of the surrounding country. In whatever

direction the boy may have looked, he saw rock. Rock is the feature of the landscape. There is rock in the old orchard behind the house; rocks peep out from the grass in the pastures; there is rock along the road; rock on the sides of the hills; rock on their summits; rock in the valleys; rock in the woods;-rock, rock, everywhere rock. And yet the country has not a barren look. I should call it a serious looking country; one that would be congenial to grim covenanters and exiled round-heads. The prevailing colors are dark, even in the brightest month of the year. The pine woods, the rock, the shade of the hill, the color of the soil, are all dark and serious. It is a still, unfrequented region. One may ride along the road upon which the house stands, for many a mile, without passing a single vehicle. The turtles hobble across the road fearless of the crushing wheel. If any one wished to know the full meaning of the word country, as distinguished from the word town, he need do no more than ascend the hill on which Horace Greeley saw the light, and look around.

Yet, the voice of the city is heard even there; the opinions of the city influence there; for, observe, in the very room in which our hero was born, on a table which stands where, in other days, a bed stood, we recognize, among the heap of newspapers, the wellknown heading of the WEEKLY TRIBUNE.

Such was the character of the region in which Horace Greeley passed the greater part of the first seven years of his life. His father's neighbors were all hard-working farmers-men who worked their own farms-who were nearly equal in wealth, and to whom the idea of social inequality, founded upon an inequality in possessions, did not exist, even as an idea. Wealth and want were alike unknown. It was a community of plain people, who had derived all their hook-knowledge from the district school, and depended