ermine. Finally, he
went to the keeper of the tavern, to whom he was a stranger, and asked
for the loan of six dollars, offering to leave one of his horses as a
pledge for the money, which he promised to return within two days. The
tavern-keeper was so well pleased with the boy's energy, that he loaned
him the money, and the party crossed over to Staten Island. The pawned
horse was promptly redeemed.

Young Vanderbilt was always anxious to become a sailor, and, as he
approached his seventeenth year, he determined to begin life as a
boatman in the harbor of New York. On the 1st of May, 1810, he informed
his mother of his determination, and asked her to lend him one hundred
dollars to buy a boat.

The good lady had always opposed her son's wish to go to sea, and
regarded this new scheme as equally hair-brained. As a means of
discouraging him, she told him if he would plow, harrow, and plant with
corn a certain ten-acre lot belonging to the farm, by the twenty-seventh
of that month, on which day he would be seventeen years old, she would
lend him the money. The field was the worst in the whole farm; it was
rough, hard, and stony; but by the appointed time the work was done, and
well done, and the boy claimed and received his money. He hurried off to
a neighboring village, and bought his boat, in which he set out for
home. He had not gone far, however, when the boat struck a sunken wreck,
and filled so rapidly that the boy had barely time to get into shoal
water before it sank.

[Illustration: VANDERBILT EARNING HIS FIRST HUNDRED DOLLARS.]

"Undismayed at this mishap," says Mr. Parton, from whose graphic memoir
the leading incidents of this sketch are taken, "he began his new
career. His success, as we have intimated, was speedy and great. He made
a thousand dollars during each of the next three summers. Often he
worked all night; but he was never absent from his post by day, and he
soon had the cream of the boating business of the port.

"At that day parents claimed the services and earnings of their children
till they were twenty-one. In other words, families made common cause
against the common enemy, Want. The arrangement between this young
boatman and his parents was, that he should give them all his day
earnings and half his night earnings. He fulfilled his engagement
faithfully until his parents released him from it, and with his own half
of his earnings by night, he bought all his clothes. He had forty
competi