Mr. Greeley was born Feb. 3d, 1811, at his father's farm, in Amherst, New Hampshire. The town was part of a district first settled by a small company of sixteen families of Scotch-Irish from Londonderry. These were part of a considerable emigration in 1718 from that city, whose members at first endeavored to settle in Massachusetts; but they were so ill received by the Massachusetts settlers that they found it necessary to scatter away into distant parts of the country before they could find rest for the soles of their feet. The ancestors of Mr. Greeley were farmers, those of the name of Greeley being often also blacksmiths. The boy was fully occupied with hard farm work, and he attended the American farmers' college, the District School. He had an intense natural love for acquiring knowledge, and learned to read of himself. He could read any child's book when he was three, and any ordinary book at four; and having, as his biographer, Mr. Parton, suggests, still an overplus of mental activity, he learned to read as readily with the book sideways or upside down, as right side up. Mr. Greeley, like a number of men who have grown up to become capable of a vast quantity of hard work and usefulness, was extremely feeble at birth, and was even thought scarcely likely to live when he first entered the world. During his first year he was feeble and sickly. His mother, who had lost her two children born next before him, seemed to be doubly fond of her weak little one, both for the sake of those that were gone, and of his very weakness, and she kept him by her side much more closely than if he had been strong and well; and day after day, she sung and repeated to him an endless store of songs and ballads, stories and traditions. This vivid oral literature doubtless had great influence in stimulating the child's natural aptitude for mental activity. Mr. Greeley's father was not a much better financier than his son. In 1820, in spite of all the honest hard-work that he could do, he became bankrupt, and in 1821 moved to a new residence in Vermont. Mr. Greeley seems to have had such an inborn instinct after newspapers and newspaper work, as Mozart had for music and musical composition. He himself says on this point, in his own "Recollections" in The New York Ledger, "Having loved and devoured newspapers--indeed every form of periodical--from childhood, I early resolved to be a printer if I could." When only eleven years old he applied to be received as an apprentice in a newspaper office at Whitehall, Vt., and was greatly cast down by being refused for his youth. Four years afterwards, in the spring of 1826, he obtained employment in the office of the Northern Spectator, at East Poultney, Vt., and thus began his professional career.