nly opportunity for education was the district
school, two miles distant--where, during the cold and windy winter days,
with a fire roaring in the capacious fire-place, he acquired the
rudiments of education. A few academies had been established in the
State, but there were not many farmer's sons who could afford to pay, at
that period, even board and tuition, which in these days would be
regarded as but a pittance.

Very early in life this Campton boy learned that Pemigewassett valley,
though so beautiful, was but an insignificant part of the world.
Intuitively his expanding mind comprehended that the tides and currents
of progress were flowing in other directions, and in April, 1823, before
he had attained his majority, he bade farewell to his birthplace, made
his way to Boston--spending the first night at Concord, New Hampshire,
having made forty miles on foot; the second at Amoskeag, the third in
Boston, stopping at the grandest hotel of that period in the
city--Wildes', on Elm street, where the cost of living was one dollar
per day. He had but two dollars and a half, and his stay at the most
luxurious hotel in the city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants was
necessarily brief. He was a rugged young man, inured to hard labor, and
found employment on a farm in Newton, receiving twelve dollars a month.
In the fall he was once more in Campton. The succeeding summer found him
at work in a brick yard. In 1826 he was back in Boston, doing business
as a provision dealer in the newly-erected Quincy market.

But there was a larger sphere for this young man, just entering manhood,
than a stall in the market house. In common with multitudes of young men
and men in middle age he was turning his thoughts towards the boundless
West. Ohio was the bourne for emigrants at that period. Thousands of New
Englanders were selecting their homes in the Western Reserve. At
Ashtabula the young man from Quincy market began the business of
supplying Boston and New York with beef and pork, making his shipments
via the Erie Canal.

But there was a farther West, and in the Winter of 1833-4 he proceeded
to Chicago, then a village of three hundred inhabitants, and began to
supply them, and the company of soldiers garrisoning Fort Dearborn, with
fresh beef; hanging up his slaughtered cattle upon a tree standing on
the site now occupied by the Court House.

This glance at the condition of society and the mechanic arts during the
boyhood of Sylves