e, formed the staples of his reading and
reflection. For two years he pleaded with his father to apprentice him
to a printer; the day that the printer refused the boy and showed the
poor farmer and his son the door, brought black gloom to his heart, for
when the door of the printing office closed before him, the gates of
paradise seemed shut forever.

Trained in the school of experience, and a graduate of the university of
hard-knocks, at twenty years of age the boy determined to seek his
fortune in New York. There are few scenes more pathetic than the
spectacle of this friendless boy starting to walk from Erie, Pa., to
this metropolis, then a city of only two hundred thousand people. He had
a tow head, a bent form, a singular dress, and carried his entire
belongings in a little bundle, supported by a walking stick thrown over
his shoulder. Partly on foot, partly on the wagon of some farmer, who
gave the traveller a lift, partly on the canal boats, Horace Greeley
made his way until, after many days, in August, 1831, he landed at the
foot of Wall Street.

Not Benjamin Franklin, landing on the wharves of Philadelphia, and
buying a fresh roll on which he breakfasted while he went about looking
for work, is so fascinating a figure as this simple-hearted, unworldly,
artless, unsophisticated youth, with the step of a clodhopper and the
face of an angel. Counting his coin, the boy found he had ten dollars
left, and straightway took lodgings on West Street, for which he
promised to pay two dollars and a half a week. He soon found a job and
began to set type on an edition of the New Testament, with marginal
notes in Greek and Latin. In two years he had his own printing office,
and in 1834 the youth found his place as the editor of the _New Yorker_,
a weekly that first of all took stories and the name of Charles Dickens
to the people of New York. He soon carried the newspaper up to nine
thousand subscribers, and a gross income of $25,000. Genius makes its
own way. The world is always looking for unique ability. Horace Greeley
had the art of putting things. He could make a statement that would go
to the intellect like an arrow to the bull's-eye. There is always
plenty of room for the man who has a gift and can do a thing better than
any one else.

But the panic of 1837 bankrupted Greeley, who knew nothing about the
business end of his enterprise. He had 9,000 subscribers, but none of
them would pay their bills, and the more his