James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[33] or did in those days, went out to work as soon as he was old enough to do a day's work. He saved his earnings, and in his twenty-fifth year was the owner of a farm in the town of Amherst, Hillsborough county, New Hampshire.

There, on the third of February, 1811, Horace Greeley was born. He is the third of seven children, of whom the two elder died before he was born, and the four younger are still living.

The mode of his entrance upon the stage of the world was, to say the least of it, unusual. The effort was almost too much for him, and, to use the language of one who was present, ‘he cane into the world as black as a chimney.’ There were no signs of life. He uttered no cry; he made no motion; he did not breathe. But the little discolored stranger had articles to write, and was not permitted to escape his destiny. In this alarming crisis of his existence, a kind-hearted and experienced aunt came to his rescue, and by arts, which to kind-hearted and experienced aunts are well known, but of which the present chronicler remains in ignorance, the boy was brought to life. He soon began to breathe; then he began to blush; and by the time he had attained the age of twenty minutes, lay on his mother's arm, a red and smiling infant.

In due time, the boy received the name of Horace. There had been another little Horace Greeley before him, but he had died in infancy, and his parents wished to preserve in their second son a living memento of their first. The name was not introduced into the family from any partiality on the part of his parents for the Roman poet, but because his father had a relative so named, and because the mother had read the name in a book and liked the sound of it. The sound of it, however, did not often regale the maternal ear; for, in New England, where the name of the courtly satirist is frequently given, its household diminutive is ‘Hod;’ and by that elegant monosyllable the boy was commonly called among his juvenile friends.