ND

[_To Mr. Moore_]

The worst of it is, by the time one has finished a piece, it has been
so often viewed and reviewed before the mental eye that one loses, in a
good measure, the power of critical discrimination. Here the best
criterion I know is a friend--not only of abilities to judge, but with
good nature enough like a prudent teacher with a young learner to
praise a little more than is exactly just, lest the thin-skinned animal
fall into that most deplorable of all diseases--heart-breaking
despondency of himself. Dare I, sir, already immensely indebted to
your goodness, ask the additional obligation of your being that friend
to me? . . .

HORACE GREELEY

(1811-1872)

HOW THE FARM-BOY BECAME AN EDITOR

Horace Greeley, the farmer's son, lived most of his life in the
metropolis, yet he always looked like a farmer, and most people would
be willing to admit that he retained the farmer's traditional goodness
of heart, if not quite all of his traditional simplicity. His judgment
was keen and shrewd, and for many years the cracker-box philosophers of
the village store impatiently awaited the sorting of the mail chiefly
that they might learn what "Old Horace" had to say about some new
picture in the kaleidoscope of politics.

From "Captains of Industry," by James Parton. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1884.

I have seldom been more interested than in hearing Horace Greeley tell
the story of his coming to New York, in 1831, and gradually working his
way into business there.

He was living at the age of twenty years with his parents in a small
log-cabin in a new clearing of Western Pennsylvania, about twenty miles
from Erie. His father, a Yankee by birth, had recently moved to that
region and was trying to raise sheep there, as he had been accustomed
to do in Vermont. The wolves were too numerous there.

It was part of the business of Horace and his brother to watch the
flock of sheep, and sometimes they camped out all night, sleeping with
their feet to the fire, Indian fashion. He told me that occasionally a
pack of wolves would come so near that he could see their eyeballs
glare in the darkness and hear them pant. Even as he lay in the loft
of his father's cabin he could hear them howling in the fields. In
spite of all their care, the wolves killed in one season a hundred of
his father's sheep, and then he gave up the attempt.

The family were so poor that it was a matter of doubt sometimes wheth