reading without difficulty at three years of age, and read any ordinary
book at five. There never was an hour when he was not the best scholar
in the little log schoolhouse, where he suffered the long winter
through, scorched if he was on the inside circle next to the fire, or
freezing if he was on the outer rim.

Reading was the boy's master passion. Like the locust, he consumed every
dry twig and green branch of knowledge. Before he was ten years of age
he believed he had read every book that could be borrowed within a
radius of six miles. He read the Bible through, every word, when he was
five years old; at eleven he had read Shakespeare and Byron. Spelling
was at once a taste and an acquisition. The people of his neighbourhood
put the child up against other crack spellers in the school districts.
It is said that in the old evening spelling-bees, his school-teacher,
who had him in charge, had to wake the child up when his turn came
around to spell. The trustees of Bedford Academy passed a resolution
permitting Horace Greeley, although outside of the district, to enter
their school, while a few teachers raised a purse, and made an offer to
his father to send the boy to Phillips Exeter Academy. But pride
prevented. Horace Greeley's childhood fell on evil days. Men were
miserably poor. It was one long warfare with hunger and cold. The
ravages of disease among children were really the result of insufficient
food in those poverty-stricken times. Although the mortgage on the farm
was a mere bagatelle, the father lost the homestead, and became a hired
man on fifty cents a day, on which amount he had to feed and clothe his
family. This boy worked by day and studied by night. History and
politics, poetry and science, formed the staples of his reading and
reflection. For two years he pleaded with his father to apprentice him
to a printer; the day that the printer refused the boy and showed the
poor farmer and his son the door, brought black gloom to his heart, for