m, he had worked on a
Vermont farm, and for a time it seemed to him as if he must forever
remain on a farm; but after a few winters of schooling he started over
the Vermont hills to learn the printer's trade. A boy was not needed
in Whitehall, and he pushed on to Poultney. There he found work for
four years until the _Northern Spectator_ expired. Then he went back
to the farm. But newspaper life in a small town had made him ambitious
to try his fortunes in a city, and, journeying from one printing
office to another, he finally drifted, in 1831, at the age of twenty,
into New York.

Up to this time Greeley's life had resembled Weed's only in his
voracious appetite for reading newspapers. He cared little for the
boys about town and less for the sports of youth; he could dispense
with sleep, and wasted no time thinking about what he should eat or
wear; but books, and especially newspapers, were read with the avidity
that a well-fed threshing machine devours a stack of wheat. He seemed
to have only one ambition--the acquisition of knowledge and the career
of a man of letters, and in his efforts to succeed, he ignored forms
and social usages, forgot that he had a physical body to care for, and
detested man-worship. Standing at last before a printer's case on
Broadway, he was able to watch, almost from the beginning, the great
political drama in which he was destined to play so great a part.
Seward had just entered the State Senate; Weed, having recently
established the _Evening Journal_, was massing the Anti-Masons and
National Republicans for their last campaign; William Lloyd Garrison
had issued the first number of the _Liberator_; Gerrit Smith, already
in possession of his father's vast estate, still clung to the Liberian
colonisation scheme; and Van Buren, not yet returned from England, was
about entering upon the last stage of his phenomenally successful
political career. Politicians for the first time disturbed about the
tariff, the bank, and internal improvements, had come to the parting
of the ways; the old order of things had ended under John Quincy
Adams--the new had just commenced under Andrew Jackson. But the young
compositor needed no guide-post to direct his political footsteps. In
1834, he had established the _New Yorker_ and those who read it became
Whigs. His mind acted upon other minds of a certain constitution with
wonderful magnetism, attracting thousands of readers by his marvellous
gift of expression a