devil.

"The devil finds some mischief still for idle hands to do."

Such teaching had its legitimate effect, and the subject of this sketch
in common with the boys and girls of his generation made work a duty.
What was accepted as duty became pleasure.

Aside from the district school he attended Boscawen Academy a few terms.
The teaching could not be called first-class instruction. The
instructors were students just out of college, who taught for the
stipend received rather than with any high ideal of teaching as a
profession. A term at Pembroke Academy in 1843 completed his acquisition
of knowledge, so far as obtained in the schools.

The future journalist was an omnivorous reader. Everything was fish that
came to the dragnet of this New Hampshire boy--from "Sinbad" to
"Milton's Paradise Lost," which was read before he was eleven years old.

The household to which he belonged had ever a goodly supply of weekly
papers, the _New Hampshire Statesman_, the _Herald of Freedom_, the _New
Hampshire Observer_, all published at Concord; the first political, the
second devoted to anti-slavery, the third a religious weekly. In the
westerly part of the town was a circulating library of some one hundred
and fifty volumes, gathered about 1816--the books were dog-eared, soiled
and torn. Among them was the "History of the Expedition of Lewis and
Clark up the Missouri and down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean," which
was read and re-read by the future correspondent, till every scene and
incident was impressed upon his memory as distinctly as that of the die
upon the coin. Another volume was a historical novel entitled "A Peep at