James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[70] him completely under the log, to get out. Horace emerged, half. drowned, and again hung for life at the rough bark. But the future hero of ten thousand paragraphs was not to be crowned in a millpond; so the log floated into shallower water, when, by making a last, spasmodic effort, he succeeded in springing up high enough to get safely upon its broad back. It was a narrow escape for both; but Horace, with all his reams of articles forming in his head, came as near taking a summary departure to that bourn where no Tribune could have been set up, as a boy could, and yet not go. He went dripping home, and recovered from the effects of his adventure in due time.

This was Horace Greeley's first experience of “log-rolling.” It was not calculated to make him like it.

One of the first subjects which the boy seriously considered, and perhaps the first upon which he arrived at a decided opinion, was Religion. And this was the more remarkable from the fact, that his education at home was not of a nature to direct his attention strongly to the subject. Both of his parents assented to the Orthodox creed of New England; his father inherited a preference for the Baptist denomination; his mother a leaning to the Presbyterian. But neither were members of a church, and neither were particularly devout. The father, however, was somewhat strict in certain observances. He would not allow novels and plays to be read in the house on Sundays, nor an heretical book at any time. The family, when they lived near a church, attended it with considerable regularity—Horace among the rest. Sometimes the father would require the children to read a certain number of chapters in the Bible on Sunday. And if the mother—as mothers are apt to be—was a little less scrupulous upon such points, and occasionally winked at Sunday novel-reading, it certainly did not arise from any set disapproval of her husband's strictness. It was merely that she was the mother, he the father, of the family. The religious education of Horace was, in short, of a nature to leave his mind, not unbiased in favor of orthodoxy—that had been almost impossible in New England thirty years ago—but as nearly in equilibrium on the subject, in a state as favorable to original inquiry, as the place and circumstances of his early life rendered possible.

There was not in Westhaven one individual who was known to