[97]
dispute—as a dictionary settles a dispute respecting the spelling of a word.
A minute after, the boy left the dining-room, and I never saw him again, till I met him, years after, in the streets of New York, when I claimed acquaintance with him as a brother Vermontes, and told him this story, to his great amusement.
One of his fellow-apprentices favors me with some interesting reminiscences.
He says, ‘I was a fellow-apprentice with
Horace Greeley at
Poultney for nearly two years. We boarded together during that period at four different places, and we were constantly together.’
The following passage from a letter from this early friend of our hero will be welcome to the reader, notwithstanding its repetitions of a few facts already known to him:—
Little did the inhabitants of East Poultney, where Horace Greeley went to reside in April, 1826, as an apprentice to the printing business, dream of the potent influence he was a few years later destined to exert, not only upon the politics of a neighboring State, but upon the noblest and grandest philanthropic enterprises of the age. He was then a remarkably plain-looking unsophisticated lad of fifteen, with a slouching, careless gait, leaning away forward as he walked, as if both his head and his heels were too heavy for his body.
He wore a wool hat of the old stamp, with so small a brim, that it looked more like a two-quart measure inverted than a hat; and he had a singular, whining voice that provoked the merriment of the older apprentices, who had hardly themselves outgrown, in their brief village residence, similar peculiarities of country breeding.
But the rogues could not help pluming themselves upon their superior manners and position; and it must be confessed that the young “ stranger ” was mercilessly “ taken in” by his elders in the office, whenever an opportunity for a practical joke presented itself.
But these things soon passed away, and as Horace was seen to be an unusually intelligent and honest lad, he came to be better appreciated.
The office in which he was employed was that of the ‘Northern Spectator,’ a weekly paper then published by Messrs. Bliss & Dewey, and edited by E. G. Stone, brother to the late Col. Stone of the N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.
The new comer boarded in Mr. Stone's family, by whom he was well esteemed for his boyish integrity; and Mr. S. on examination found him better skilled in English grammar, even at that early age, than were the majority of school teachers in those times.
His superior intelligence also strongly commended him to the notice of Amos Bliss, Esq., one of the firm already mentioned, then and now a highly-respectable merchant of East Poultney, who has marked with pride and pleasure every successive step of the “ Westhaven boy,” from that day to this.
