James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[109] fishing occasionally, and otherwise amusing himself; while his good mother assiduously nursed the sore leg. It healed too slowly for its impatient proprietor, who had learned “to labor,” not “to wait;” and so, one morning, he walked over to Jamestown, a town twenty miles distant, where a newspaper was struggling to get published, and applied for work. Work he obtained It was very freely given; but at the end of the week the workman received a promise to pay, but no payment. He waited and worked four days longer, and discovering by that time that there was really no money to be had or hoped for in Jamestown, he walked home again, as poor as before.

And now the damaged leg began to swell again prodigiously; at one time it was as large below the knee as a demijohn. Cut off from other employment, Horace devoted all his attention to the unfortunate member, but without result. He heard about this time of a famous doctor who lived in that town of Pennsylvania which exult in the singular name of “North-East,” distant twenty-five miles from his father's clearing. To him, as a last resort, though the family could ill afford the trifling expense, Horace went, and stayed with him a month. ‘You don't drink liquor,’ were the doctor's first words as he examined the sore, ‘if you did, you'd have a bad leg of it.’ The patient thought he had a bad leg of it, without drinking liquor. The doctor's treatment was skillful, and finally successful. Among other remedies, he subjected the limb to the action of electricity, and from that day the cure began. The patient left North-East greatly relieved, and though the leg was weak and troublesome for many more months, yet it gradually recovered, the wound subsiding at length into a long red scar.

He wandered, next, in an easterly direction, in search of employment, and found it in the village of Lodi, fifty miles off, in Cataraugus county, New York. At Lodi, he seems to have cherished a hope of being able to remain awhile and earn a little money. He wrote to his friends in Poultney describing the paper on which he worked, ‘as a Jackson paper, a forlorn affair, else I would have sent you a few numbers.’ One of his letters written from Lodi to a friend in Vermont, contains a passage which may serve to show what was going on in the mind of the printer as he stood at the case setting up Jacksonian paragraphs. ‘You are aware that an ’