James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[119] hour, by suggesting that he, had been courting all night. Sunday evening in country places is sacred to love. His appearance was so exceedingly unlike that of a lover, that this sally created much amusement, in which the wakeful traveler shared. At Rochester he took a faster boat. Wednesday night he reached Schenectady, where he left the canal and walked to Albany, as the canal between those two towns is much obstructed by locks. He reached Albany on Thursday morning, just in time to see the seven o'clock steamboat move out into the stream. He, therefore, took passage in a tow-boat which started at ten o'clock on the same morning. At sunrise on Friday, the eighteenth of August, 1831, Horace Greeley landed at Whitehall, close to the Battery, in the city of New York.

New York was, and is, a city of adventurers. Few of our eminent citizens were born here. It is a common boast among New Yorkers, that this great merchant and that great millionaire came to the city a ragged boy, with only three and sixpence in his pocket; and now look at him! In a list of the one hundred men who are esteemed to be the most “successful” among the citizens of New York, it is probable that seventy-five of the names would be those of men who began their career here in circumstances that gave no promise of future eminence. But among them all, it is questionable whether there was one who on his arrival had so little to help, so much to hinder him, as Horace Greeley.

Of solid cash, his stock was ten dollars. His other property consisted of the clothes he wore, the clothes he carried in his small bundle, and the stick with which he carried it. The clothes he wore need not be described; they were those which had already astonished the people of Erie. The clothes he carried were very few, and precisely similar in cut and quality to the garments which he exhibited to the public. On the violent supposition that his wardrobe could in any case have become a saleable commodity, we may compute that he was worth, on this Friday morning at sunrise, ten dollars and seventy-five cents. He had no friend, no acquaintance here. There was not a human being upon whom he had any claim for help or advice. His appearance was all against him. He looked in his round jacket like an overgrown boy. No one was likely to observe the engaging beauty of his face, or the noble round of his brow under that overhanging hat, over that