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 when the door of the printing office closed before him, the gates of paradise seemed shut forever. Trained in the school of experience, and a graduate of the university of hard-knocks, at twenty years of age the boy determined to seek his fortune in New York. There are few scenes more pathetic than the spectacle of this friendless boy starting to walk from Erie, Pa., to this metropolis, then a city of only two hundred thousand people. He had a tow head, a bent form, a singular dress, and carried his entire belongings in a little bundle, supported by a walking stick thrown over his shoulder. Partly on foot, partly on the wagon of some farmer, who gave the traveller a lift, partly on the canal boats, Horace Greeley made his way until, after many days, in August, 1831, he landed at the foot of Wall Street.