Success was not an accident with the Christian admiral. It was the result of devotion to duty, real bravery, and a life distinguished by purity of character and the highest sense of honor.
EZRA CORNELL.
In the winter of 1819 might have been seen travelling from New Jersey to De Ruyter in New York, a distance of two hundred and fifty miles, some covered emigrant wagons, containing a wife and six children in the first, and household goods and farming utensils in the others. Sometimes the occupants slept in a farmhouse, but usually in their vehicles by a camp-fire in the woods.
For two weeks they journeyed, sometimes through an almost uninhabited wilderness and over wellnigh impassable roads. The mother, with a baby in her arms,—her oldest child, Ezra, a boy of twelve,—must have been worn with this toilsome journey; but patient and cheerful, no word of repining escaped her lips. Elijah Cornell, a frank, noble-hearted Quaker, was going West to make his living as a potter and farmer combined.
Like other pioneers, they made ready their little home among the sterile hills; and there, for twenty years, they struggled to rear a family that grew to eleven children, instead of six. The boys of the family were taught the simple mysteries of pottery-making early in life, and thus formed habits of industry, while their limited income necessarily made them economical.
EZRA CORNELL.
(From his Biography, by Gov. A. B. Cornell.)
The eldest boy, Ezra,—now sixteen,—was growing anxious to be something more than a potter. He was nearly six feet tall, thin, muscular, and full of energy. He was studious, reading every book within his reach, and desirous of an education, which there was no money to procure. Determined, if possible, to go to the common school one more winter, he and his brother, fifteen years of age, chopped and cleared four acres of heavy beech and maple woodland, plowed, and planted it to corn, and thus made themselves able to finish their education.