struggling unaided
to force his little paper upon an indifferent if not a hostile public.

James Gordon Bennett, you will observe, was forty years old at this
stage of his career. Generally a man who is going to found anything
extraordinary has laid a deep foundation, and got his structure a good
way above ground before he is forty years of age. But there was he, past
forty, and still wrestling with fate, happy if he could get three
dollars a week over for his board. Yet he was a strong man, gifted with
a keen intelligence, strictly temperate in his habits, and honest in his
dealings. The only point against him was, that he had no power and
apparently no desire to make personal friends. He was one of those who
cannot easily ally themselves with other men, but must fight their fight
alone, victors or vanquished.

A native of Scotland, he was born a Roman Catholic, and was partly
educated for the priesthood in a Catholic seminary there; but he was
diverted from the priestly office, as it appears, by reading Byron,
Scott, and other literature of the day. At twenty he was a romantic,
impulsive, and innocent young man, devouring the Waverley novels, and in
his vacations visiting with rapture the scenes described in them. The
book, however, which decided the destiny of this student was of a very
different description, being no other than the "Autobiography of
Benjamin Franklin," a book which was then read by almost every boy who
read at all. One day, at Aberdeen, a young acquaintance met him in the
street, and said to him:--

"I am going to America, Bennett."

"To America! When? Where?"

"I am going to Halifax on the 6th of April."

"My dear fellow," said Bennett, "I'll go with you. I want to see the
place where Franklin was born."

Three months after he stepped ashore at the beautiful town of Halifax in
Nova Scotia, with only money enough in his pocket to pay his board for
about two weeks. Gaunt poverty was upon him soon, and he was glad to
earn a meagre subsistence for a few weeks, by teaching. He used to speak
of his short residence in Halifax as a time of severe privation and
anxiety, for it was a place then of no great wealth, and had little to
offer to a penniless adventurer, such as he was.

He made his way to Portland, in Maine, before the first winter set in,
and thence found passage in a schooner bound to Boston. In one of the
early numbers of his paper he described his arrival at that far-famed
harbor, an