nor soiled, to lend it to me. In returning with the prize, I was too
happy to think of the snow or my naked feet.

"Candles were then among the luxuries, not the necessaries, of life. If
boys, instead of going to bed after dark, wanted to read, they supplied
themselves with pine knots, by the light of which, in a horizontal
position, they pursued their studies. In this manner, with my body in
the sugar-house, and my head out of doors, where the fat pine was
blazing, I read with intense interest the book I had borrowed, a
'History of the French Revolution.'"

Weed's next earning was in an iron foundry at Onondaga:

"My business was, after a casting, to temper and prepare the molding
'dogs,' myself. This was night and day work. We ate salt pork and rye
and Indian bread, three times a day, and slept on straw in bunks. I
liked the excitement of a furnace life."

When he went to the "Albany Argus" to learn the printing business he
worked from five in the morning till nine at night.


FROM HUMBLEST BEGINNINGS.

The more difficulties one has to encounter, within and without, the
more significant and the higher in inspiration his life will be.--_Horace
Bushnell_.

The story of Weed and of Greeley is not an uncommon one in America. Some
of the most eminent men on the globe have struggled with poverty in