James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[113] to work at the press, unless the office was so much hurried that his services in that department could not be dispensed with. He had had a little difficulty with his leg, and press work rather hurt him than otherwise. The bargain included the condition that he was to board at Mr. Sterritt's house; and when he went to dinner on the day of his arrival, a lady of the family expressed her opinion of him in the following terms:—‘So, Mr. Sterritt, you've hired that fellow to work for you, have you? Well, you won't keep him three days.’ In three days she had changed her opinion; and to this hour the good lady cannot bring herself to speak otherwise than kindly of him, though she is a stanch daughter of turbulent Erie, and “must say, that certain articles which appeared in the Tribune during the war did really seem too bad from one who had been himself an Eriean.” But then, “he gave no more trouble in the house than if he had'nt been in it.”

Erie, famous in the Last War but one, as the port whence Commodore Perry sailed out to victory—Erie, famous in the last war of all, as the place where the men, except a traitorous thirteen, and the women, except their faithful wives, all rose as on man against the Railway Trains, saying, in the tone which is generally described as “not to be misunderstood” : ‘Thus far shalt thou go without stopping for refreshment, and no farther,’ and achieved as Break of Gauge men, the distinction accorded in another land to the Break oa Day boys—Erie, which boasts of nine thousand inhabitants, and aspires to become the Buffalo of Pennsylvania—Erie, which already has business enough to sustain many stores wherein not every article known to traffic is sold, and where a man cannot consequently buy coat, hat, boots, physic, plough, crackers, grindstone and penknife, over the same counter—Erie, which has a Mayor and Aldermen, a dog-law, and an ordinance against shooting off guns in the street under a penalty of five dollars for each and every offence—Erie, for the truth cannot be longer dashed from utterance, is the shabbiest and most broken-down looking large town, I, the present writer, an individual not wholly untraveled, ever saw, in a free State of this Confederacy.

The shores of the lake there are “bluffy,” sixty feet or more above the water, and the land for many miles back is nearly a dead level, exceedingly fertile, and quite uninteresting. No, not quite. For