art. He was possessed of a
strong, vigorous constitution, and a quick, penetrating intellect. His
education was limited, for he was taken from school at the age of
eleven, and set to earning his living. Upon leaving school, he was
apprenticed to a Mr. Sylvester Proctor, who kept a "country store" in
Danvers. Here he worked hard and faithfully for four or five years,
devoting himself, with an energy and determination surprising in one so
young, to learn the first principles of business. His mind matured more
rapidly than his body, and he was a man in intellect long before he was
out of his teens. Having gained all the information it was possible to
acquire in so small an establishment, he began to wish for a wider field
for the exercise of his abilities. A retail grocery store was no longer
the place for one possessed of such talents, and thoroughly conscious of
them at such an early age, and it was natural that he should desire some
more important and responsible position.

Accordingly, he left Mr. Proctor's employment, and spent a year with his
maternal grandfather at Post Mills village, Thetford, Vermont. "George
Peabody's year at Post Mills," says a writer who knew him, "must have
been a year of intense quiet, with good examples always before him, and
good advice whenever occasion called for it; for Mr. Dodge and his wife
were both too shrewd to bore him with it needlessly.

"It was on his return from this visit that he spent a night at a tavern
in Concord, N.H., and paid for his entertainment by sawing wood the next
morning. That, however, must have been a piece of George's own voluntary
economy, for Jeremiah Dodge would never have sent his grandson home to
Danvers without the means of procuring the necessaries of life on the
way, and still less, if possible, would Mrs. Dodge...."

[Illustration: PEABODY PAYING FOR A NIGHT'S LODGING.]

"The interest with which Mr. Peabody remembered this visit to Post Mills
is shown by his second visit so late in life, and his gift of a
library--as large a library as that place needs. Of its influence on his
subsequent career, of course, there is no record. Perhaps it was not
much. But, at least, it gave him a good chance for quiet thinking, at an
age when he needed it; and the labors of the farm may have been useful
both to mind and body."

At the age of sixteen, in the year 1811, he went to Newburyport, and
became a clerk in the store of his elder brother, David Peabody, who w