Excerpt from Sketch of the Life of Horace Greeley: With Brief Extracts From His Writings and Biographical Notes The family was very poor and all had to join in the farm work. His mother, in addition to doing her housework, did spinning and weaving and helped rake and load hay; during her. Work she would sing and tell stories which aroused the interest of young Horace. She was a woman of beautiful character and was her son's inspiration. When Horace was five years old, he would ride the horse to plow before going to school, this and other duties cut down Horace's school attendance considerably. He was a precocious lad, who spent all his spare time reading, and read books at four years of age. The school he attended was a one-story, unpainted structure. He was a good speller and an able debater, and always came out ahead at spelling matches and in debate. Evidently the Village Blacksmith saw promise in Horace, as he offered to apprentice him in his shop, but Horace said he intended to become a printer. With all the hard work of the Greeley family in Amherst, farming resulted in failure and they were compelled to leave; they then tried their luck at Westhaven, Vermont. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.