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 was engaged in the dry goods business at that place. He exhibited unusual capacity and promise in his calling, and soon drew upon himself the favorable attention of the merchants of the place. He was prompt, reliable, and energetic, and from the first established an enviable reputation for personal and professional integrity. It is said that he earned here the first money he ever made outside of his business. This was by writing ballots for the Federal party in Newburyport. Printed ballots had not then come into use. He did not stay long in Newburyport, as a great fire, which burned up a considerable part of the town, destroyed his brother's store, and obliged him to seek employment elsewhere. He always retained a warm attachment to the place, however, an attachment which a resident of the town explains as follows: