n of Wendell Phillips'
dictum: "What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first
steps to something better."

Thurlow Weed, who was a journalist for fifty-seven years, strong,
sensible, genial, tactful, and of magnificent physique, who did so much
to shape public policy in the Empire State, tells a most romantic story
of his boyhood:--

"I cannot ascertain how much schooling I got at Catskill, probably less
than a year, certainly not a year and a half, and this was when I was
not more than five or six years old. I felt a necessity, at an early
age, of trying to do something for my own support.

"My first employment was in sugar-making, an occupation to which I
became much attached. I now look with great pleasure upon the days and
nights passed in the sap-bush. The want of shoes (which, as the snow was
deep, was no small privation) was the only drawback upon my happiness. I
used, however, to tie pieces of an old rag carpet around my feet, and
got along pretty well, chopping wood and gathering up sap. But when the
spring advanced, and bare ground appeared in spots, I threw off the old
carpet encumbrance and did my work barefoot.

"There is much leisure time for boys who are making maple sugar. I
devoted this time to reading, when I could obtain books; but the farmers
of that period had few or no books, save their Bibles. I borrowed books
whenever and wherever I could.

"I heard that a neighbor, three miles off, had borrowed from a still
more distant neighbor a book of great interest. I started off, barefoot,
in the snow, to obtain the treasure. There were spots of bare ground,
upon which I would stop to warm my feet. And there were also, along the
road, occasional lengths of log-fence from which the snow had melted,
and upon which it was a luxury to walk. The book was at home, and the
good people consented, upon my promise that it should be neither torn
nor soiled, to lend it to me. In returning with the prize, I was too
happy to think of the snow or my naked feet.

"Candles were then among the luxuries, not the necessaries, of life. If
boys, instead of going to bed after dark, wanted to read, they supplied
themselves with pine knots, by the light of which, in a horizontal
position, they pursued their studies. In this manner, with my body in
the sugar-house, and my head out of doors, where the fat pine was
blazing, I read with intense interest the book I had borrowed, a
'History of the French Revolution