ected beneath his roof, until they could get employment in the
country.' So testified his son concerning him in Halifax. When too old
to do any regular work, he often visited the houses of the poor and
infirm in the city and beyond Dartmouth, filling his pockets at a
grocer's with packages of tea and sugar before setting out on his
expeditions.

After the Revolution Great Britain was not regardless of her exiled
children. She treated the Loyalists with a liberality far exceeding that
of the United States to the war-worn soldiers of Washington. John Howe
was rewarded with the offices of King's Printer, and {18}
Postmaster-General of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, New
Brunswick, and the Bermudas. But in spite of these high-sounding titles,
the family income was small, and all the economies of Joe's mother--his
father's second wife, a shrewd practical Nova Scotian widow--could not
stretch it very far. At the age of thirteen young Joe was told that he
must go to work. His eldest brother had succeeded to his father's
positions, and into the printing-office the boy was sent. He began at
the lowest rung of the ladder, learned his trade from the bottom upwards,
sweeping out the office, delivering the _Gazette_, and doing all the
multitudinous errands and jobs of printer's boy before he attained to the
dignity of setting up type. 'So you're the devil,' said a judge to him
on one occasion when the boy was called on as a witness. 'Yes, sir, in
the office, but not in the Court House,' he at once answered, with a look
and gesture that threw the name back on his lordship, to the great
amusement of all present.

His education went on while he learned his trade. The study of books,
talks in the long evenings with his father, and intimate loving communion
with nature, all contributed to {19} build up his character. While he
read everything he could lay hold of, the Bible and Shakespeare were his
great teachers. He knew these thoroughly, and to his intimate
acquaintance with them he owed that pure well of English undefiled which
streamed with equal readiness from his lips and his pen. His taste was
formed on English classics, not on cheap novels. His knowledge, not only
of the great highways of English literature, but of its nooks, corners,
and byways, was singularly thorough. In after years it could easily be
seen in his speeches that his knowledge was not of the kind that is
crammed for the occasion.