he way for his visionary scheme he applied to a bright
young journalist, the editor of the Manlius _Republican_, to canvass
the western and southwestern counties of the State. Thurlow Weed at
this time was twenty-six years old. He had worked on a farm, he had
blown a blacksmith's bellows, he had shipped as a cabin-boy, he had
done chores at a tavern, he had served as a soldier, and he had
learned the printer's trade. For twenty years he lived a life of
poverty, yet of tireless industry, with a simplicity as amazing as his
genius. The only thing of which he got nothing was schooling. His
family was an old Connecticut one, which had come down in the world.
Everything went wrong with his father. He was hard-working,
kind-hearted, and strictly honest, but nothing succeeded. With the
hope of "bettering his condition," he moved five times in ten years,
getting so desperately poor at last that a borrowed two-horse sleigh
carried all his worldly goods, including a wife and five children.
Joel Weed was, perhaps, as unfortunate a man as ever brought an
illustrious son into the world. He was neither shiftless nor
worthless, but what others did he could not do. He never took up land
for himself because he had nothing to begin with. A neighbour who
began with an axe and a hoe, entered fifty acres, and got rich.

If Joel Weed lived as a beggar, Thurlow thought as a king. He revelled
in the mountains and streams interspersed along the routes of the
family's frequent movings; his taste for adventure made the sloop's
cabin a home, and his love for reading turned the blacksmith shop and
printing office into a schoolroom. As he read he forgot that he was
poor, forgot that he was ragged, forgot that he was hungry. In his
autobiography he tells of walking bare-footed six miles through the
snow to borrow a history of the French Revolution, and of reading it
at night in the blaze of a pitch-pine knot. Men found him lovable. He
was large and awkward; but even as a boy there was a charm of manner,
a tender, sympathetic nature, a sweet, sparkling humour, and a
nobility of character that irresistibly drew people to him. In many
respects his boyhood resembled Lincoln's, and, though he lived in some
of the evil days of the last century, his youth, like Lincoln's,
escaped pollution. At the age of twelve, as an apprentice in a weekly
newspaper office at Onondaga Hollow, he read and filed every exchange
paper, familiarising himself with discussions in