upon the village newspaper for their knowledge of the world without. There were no heretics among them. All the people either cordially embraced or undoubtingly assented to the faith called Orthodox, and all of them attended, more or less regularly, the churches in which that faith was expounded.

The first great peril of his existence escaped, the boy grew apace, and passed through the minor and ordinary dangers of infancy without having his equanimity seriously disturbed. He was a "quiet and peaceable child," reports his father, and, though far from robust, suffered little from actual sickness.

To say that Horace Greeley, from the earliest months of his existence, manifested signs of extraordinary intelligence, is only to repeat what every biographer asserts of his hero, and every mother of her child. Yet, common-place as it is, the truth must be told. Horace Greeley did, as a very young child, manifest signs of extraordinary intelligence. He took to learning with the promptitude and instinctive, irrepressible love, with which a duck is said to take to the water. His first instructor was his mother; and never was there a mother better calculated to awaken the mind of a child, and keep it awake, than Mrs. Greeley.

Tall, muscular, well-formed, with the strength of a man without his coarseness, active in her habits, not only capable of hard work, but delighting in it, with a perpetual overflow of animal spirits, an exhaustless store of songs, ballads and stories, and a boundless, exuberant good will toward all living things, Mrs. Greeley was the life of the house, the favorite of the neighborhood, the natural friend and ally of children; whatever she did she did "with a will." She was a great reader, and remembered all she read. "She worked," says one of my informants, "in doors and out of doors, could out-rake any man in the town, and could load the hay-wag ons as fast and as well as her husband. She hoed in the garden: she labored in the field; and, while doing more than the work of an ordinary man and an ordinary woman combined, would laugh and sing all day long, and tell stories all the evening."

To these stories the boy listened greedily, as he sat on the floor at her feet, while she spun and talked with equal energy. They "served," says Mr. Greeley, in a passage already quoted, “to awaken in me a thirst fi›r knowledge, and a lively interest in learning and

history." Think of it, you word-mongering, gerund-grinding teachers who delight in signs and symbols, and figures and "facts," and feed little children's souls on the dry, innutritious husks of knowledge; and think of it, you play-abhorring, fiction-forbidding parents! Awaken the interest in learning, and the thirst for knowledge, and there is no predicting what may or what may not result from it. Scarcely a man, distinguished for the supremacy or the beauty of his immortal part, has written the history of his childhood without recording the fact that the celestial fire was first kindled in his soul by means similar to those which awakened an "interest in learning" and a "thirst for knowledge" in the mind of Horace Greeley.

Horace learned to read before he had learned to talk; that is, before he could pronounce the longer words. No one regularly taught him. When he was little more than two years old, he began to pore over the Bible, opened for his entertainment on the floor, and examine with curiosity the newspaper given him to play with. He cannot remember a time when he could not read, nor can any one give an account of the process by which he learned, except that he asked questions incessantly, first about the pictures in the newspaper, then about the capital letters, then about the smaller ones, and finally about the words and sentences. At three years of age he could read easily and correctly any or the books prepared for children; and at four, any book whatever. But he was not satisfied with overcoming the ordinary difficulties of reading. Allowing that nature gives to every child a certain amount of mental force to be used in acquiring the art of reading, Horace had an overplus of that force, which he employed in learning to read with his book in positions which increased the difficulty of the feat. All the friends and neighbors of his early childhood, in reporting him a prodigy unexampled, adduce as the unanswerable and clinching proof of the fact, that, at the age of four years, he could read any book in whatever position it might be placed,-right-side up, up-side down, or sidewise.

His third winter Horace spent at the house of his grandfather, David Woodburn, in Londonderry, attended the district school there, and distinguished himself greatly. He had no right to attend the Londonderry school, and the people of the rural districts