His son and the poet’s father, Nathaniel Willis, Junior,--the fourth Nathaniel in the family,--was born at Boston in 1780, and remained there until 1787, when he joined his father at Winchester and was employed in his newspaper office, and subsequently at Martinsburg on the “Potomac Guardian.” In the infancy of American journalism, the editor and publisher of a paper was usually a practical printer. Young Nathaniel was put to work at once in folding papers and setting types. At Martinsburg he used to ride post, with tin horn and saddle-bags, delivering papers to scattered subscribers in the thinly settled country. N. P. Willis himself served a year’s apprenticeship at his father’s press in Boston, in an interval of his schooling; and in his letters home from England alluded triumphantly to his having once been destined by his parents to the trade of a printer. His particular duty was to ink the types. “We remember _balling_ an edition of ‘Watts’s Psalms and Hymns,’ and there are lines in that good book that, to this day, go to the tune we played with the ink-balls, while conning them over.” A sketch of the old office of the “Potomac Guardian,” made by “Porte Crayon,” is in the possession of Mr. Richard Storrs Willis of Detroit. At the age of fifteen young Nathaniel returned to Boston and entered the office of his father’s old paper, the “Independent Chronicle,” working in the same press-room in Court Street where his father had once worked, and the great Franklin before him. He also found time, while in Boston, to drill with the “Fusiliers.” In 1803, invited by a Maine congressman and other gentlemen of the Republican party, he went to Portland and established the “Eastern Argus” in opposition to the Federalists. Here the subject of this biography was born three years later. “Well do I remember that day,” his father wrote to him fifty-seven years after the event, “and the driving snow-storm in which I had to go, in an open sleigh, to bring in the nurse from the country. Francis Douglas boarded with us at that time. He was a very pleasant young man, and had a half promise (if it was a boy) it should be called _Francis_. But your mother soon overruled that, and decided that you should have both of our names, for fear she should never have another son! You was a fine fat baby, with a face as round as an apple.”