Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

HORACE GREELEY.

Among the hills of New Hampshire, in a lonely, unpainted house, Horace Greeley was born, Feb. 3, 1811, the third of seven children. His father was a plain farmer, hard-working, yet not very successful, but aided by a wife of uncommon energy and good spirits, notwithstanding her many cares. Besides her housework, and spinning, and making the children's clothes, she hoed in the garden, raked and loaded hay to help her husband, laughing and singing all day long, and telling her feeble little son, Horace, stories and legends all the evening. Her first two children having died, this boy was especially dear. Mrs. Greeley was a great reader of such books as she could obtain, and remembered all she read. It requires no great discernment to see from whence Horace Greeley derived his intense love for reading, and his boundless energy.

HORACE GREELEY.

He learned to read, one can scarcely tell how. When two years old, he would pore over the Bible, as he lay on the floor, and ask questions about the letters; at three, he went to the "district school," often carried through the deep snow on the shoulders of one of his aunts, or on the back of an older boy. He soon stood at the head of his little class in spelling and reading, "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."

Before he was six years old he had read the Bible through, and "Pilgrim's Progress." Their home contained only about twenty books, and these he read and re-read. As he grew older, every book within seven miles was borrowed, and perused after the hard day's work of farming was over. He gathered a stock of pine knots, and, lighting one each night, lay down by the hearth, and read, oblivious to all around him. The neighbors came and made their friendly visits, and ate apples and drank cider, as was the fashion, but the lad never noticed their coming or their going. When really forced to leave his precious books for bed, he would repeat the information he had learned, or the lessons for the next day, to his brother, who usually, most ungraciously, fell asleep before the conversation was half completed.

When Horace was nearly ten years old, his father, who had speculated in a small way in lumber, became a bankrupt; his house and furniture were sold by the sheriff, and he was obliged to flee from the State to avoid arrest. Some of these debts were paid, thirty years afterward, by his noble son. Going to Westhaven, Vt., Mr. Greeley obtained work on a farm, and moved his family thither. They were very poor, the children sitting on the floor and eating their porridge together out of a tin pan; but they were happy in the midst of their hard work and plain food. The father and the boys chopped logs, and the little sisters, with the mother, gathered them in heaps, the voice of the latter, says Mr. James Parton, in his biography, "ringing out in laughter from the tangled brushwood in which she was often buried." Would there were thousands more of such women, who can laugh at disaster, and keep their children and themselves from getting soured with life. Everybody has troubles; and very wise are they who do not tell them, either in their faces or by their words.

Horace earned a few pennies all his own; sometimes by selling nuts, or bundles of the roots of pitch-pine for kindling, which he carried on his back to the store. This money he spent in books, buying Mrs. Hemans's poetry and "Shakspeare." No wonder that the minister of the town said, "Mark my words; that boy was not made for nothing."

He could go to school no longer, and must now support himself. From earliest childhood he had determined to be a printer; so, when eleven years of age, he walked nine miles to see the publisher of a newspaper, and obtain a situation. The editor looked at the small, tow-haired boy, shook his head, and said, "You are too young." With a heavy heart the child walked the long nine miles back again. But he must do something; and, a little later, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, and some food tied in a bundle, which he hung on the end of a stick, slung over his shoulder, he walked one hundred and twenty miles back to New Hampshire, to see his relatives. After some weeks he returned, with a few more cents in his purse than when he started!