d the other blind--a "wall-eye." His expression is that of a man
wrapped in the mystery of his own hidden thoughts. He looks--

"Like monumental bronze, unchanged his look--
A soul which pity never touched or shook--
Trained, from his lowly cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Unchanging, fearing but the charge of fear--
A stoic of the mart, a man without a tear."

Such a man was Stephen Girard, one of the most distinguished merchants
in the annals of commerce, and the founder of the celebrated Girard
College in Philadelphia. Let us briefly trace his history and observe
his character.

Girard was a Frenchman by birth, born in the environs of Bordeaux, in
May, 1750, of obscure parents. His early instruction was very limited;
and, being deformed by a wall-eye, he was an object of ridicule to the
companions of his boyhood. This treatment, as is supposed by his
biographer, soured his temper, made him shrink from society, and led him
to live among his own thoughts rather than in mental communion with his
fellows.

The precise cause of his leaving his native hearth-stone is unknown. The
fact is certain that he did leave it, when only ten or twelve years old,
and sailed, a poor cabin-boy, to the West Indies. This was his
starting-point in life. Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to
build his fortune. He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor,
unfriended, and unknown. That from such a cheerless beginning he should
rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of the
marvels of human history.

His first step was to gain the confidence of his superiors, not so much
by affability and courtesy--for of these social virtues he was never
possessed--as by steady good conduct, fidelity to his employers,
temperance, and studied effort to do his humble duties well. Whatsoever
his hands found to do he did with his might. As a consequence, we find
him, in a few years, in high favor with a Captain Randall, of New York,
who always spoke of him as "my Stephen," and who promoted him from one
position to another, until he secured him the command of a small vessel,
and sent him on trading voyages between the ports of New York and New
Orleans. That the poor cabin-boy should rise, by his own merits, in some
six or seven years, to be the commander of a vessel was success such as
few lads have ever won with such slender means and few helps as were
within reach