But when he heard the little fellow's story of homesickness and yearning for loved places and faces, he was not angry with him, but did presently release him from his apprenticeship. And so the boy to his great joy found himself again in Newburyport and with the good old wood-sawyer. Poverty and experience were teaching the child what he never could have learned in a grammar-school, a certain acquaintance with himself and the world around him. There was growing within his breast a self-care and a self-reliance. It was the autumn of 1818, when, so to speak, the boy's primary education in the school of experience terminated, and he entered on the second stage of his training under the same rough tutelage. At the age of thirteen he entered the office of the Newburyport _Herald_ to learn to set types. At last his boy's hands had found work which his boy's heart did joy to have done. He soon mastered the compositor's art, became a remarkably rapid composer. As he set up the thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his own demanding utterance. The printer's apprentice felt the stirrings of a new life. A passion for self-improvement took possession of him. He began to read the English classics, study American history, follow the currents of party politics. No longer could it be said of him that he was not an apt pupil. He was indeed singularly apt. His intelligence quickened marvelously. The maturing process was sudden and swift. Almost before one knows it the boy in years has become a man in judgment and character. This precipitate development of the intellectual life in him, produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the _ego_. The young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed wings; and wings were for use--to soar with. Ambition, the desire to mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read, studied, and observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an instinct analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took to the discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in society. He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is at his tricks. He was also at a stage of development, when boys are least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence are by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the