Another of our distinguished countrymen, now a prominent popular orator, is said to have accumulated food for future usefulness, while devoting the energies of the outer man to the employment of a wagoner, amid the grand scenic influences of the majestic Alleghanies. The early life of Franklin, of the "Mill-boy of the Slashes," of Webster, and of many others whose names have become watchwords among us, are, doubtless, familiar to you, as examples in this respect.
Looking upon the busy active world around me,—as I sometimes like to do—from behind the screen of my newspaper, seated in the reading-room of a hotel, I became the auditor of the following conversation, between two young men, who were stationed near a window, watching the passing throng of a crowded thoroughfare.
"By George! there's Van K——," exclaimed one, with unusual animation.
"Which one,—where?" eagerly interrogated his companion.
"That's he, this side, with the Byronic nose, and short steps—he's great! What a fellow he is for making money, though!"
"Does it by his talents, don't he?—nobody like him, in the Bar of this State, for genius,—that's a fact—carries everything through by the force of genius!"
"Dev'lish clever, no doubt," assented the other, "but he used to study, I tell you, like a hero, when he was younger."
"Never heard that of him," answered the other youth, "how the deuce could he? He has always been a man about town—real fashionable fellow—practised always, since he was admitted, and everybody knows no one dines out, and goes to parties with more of a rush than Van K——, and he always has."
"That may all be, but my mother, who has known him well for years, was telling me, the other day, that those who were most charmed with his wit, and belle-lettre scholarship, when he first came upon the tapis, little knew the pains he took to accomplish himself. 'He exhibited the result, not the machinery,' she said, but he did study, and study hard, when other young fellows were asleep, or raising h——!"