William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[7] attended most of the winter, and some of the summer, months during the next three years. He also attended the district school while they lived in Vermont, as circumstances permitted. The text-books in those days were as primitive as the teaching and the discipline, embracing Webster's Spelling-Book (just introduced), The American Preceptor as a reader, and Bingam's Ladies' Accidence as a grammar. Reviewing his school days, in his Recollections of a Busy Life, Greeley said: “I deeply regret that such homely sciences as chemistry, geology, and botany were never taught. Yet I am thankful that algebra had not yet been thrust into our rural common schools, to knot the brains and squander the time of those who should have been learning something of positive and practical utility.”

Horace was certainly a precocious child. He had read the Bible through, under his mother's guidance, when he was five years old. When he was four years old he was so good a speller that, in the weekly matches at school, in which sides were chosen, he would easily secure and retain the head of his side, but was so much a child that the “choosing” of the spellers had to be committed to some one else, because he always selected for his