“ Aunt Lucy asked me if I was prepared to retire, and responding yes, she lit a cheap candle, and led me to the rear of the hovel, and up she went a ladder, like a squirrel, and bade me follow. On arriving at the door of the pigeon-house, she suspended one leg to enable me to pass her, and then gave me the candle, and we bade each other good night, and I crawled in, passing through dense partitions of cobwebs, and battalions of spiders and rats, and down I lay for the night, and counted minutes until the morning’s dawn, when I emerged from the hideous hole, in which I had nearly suffocated. ”

“ Peter Cooper has long bamboozled this city and country with his bogus philanthropy. He has not, and never will surrender his right, nor that of his heirs, to the building bearing the imposing inscription of “Union” and “To Science and Art.” He will let the first four stories, and pocket the rent, but the fifth story being (like the upper story of the Wall street buildings,) almost valueless, and which he could [10] hardly let at all, he designs devoting to human learning, by letting it to itinerating lecturers for as much as he can squeeze out of them, and put that in his pocket also. ”

“ I have got the data to write a hundred pages on Peter Cooper’s indictment, while he had a glue factory on the old Boston road, and his niggardly meanness to his nieces and nephews, and other kindred, and to the poor Irishmen at present in his glue factory in the vicinity of New York. He screws down all in his employ to such low wages, that he barely permits them to subsist, although their employment of skinning diseased cows feet and making glue is the most offensive labor under Heaven. ”

“ When quite young and penniless, the American Government owed Peter Cooper’s aunt fifteen hundred dollars, as pension money, which Peter long besought his aunt to let him strive to obtain, and she invested him with the power to collect it, and he soon obtained it without much difficulty through some of the vagabond politicians of those days, for whom he had done some dirty work in securing their election to Congress and other civil trusts. ”

“ And through his artifice and eternal excuse, (to the poor starving wretches who have solicited aid since he began his bogus intellectual edifice,) that he could not contribute a dollar to any charity except his building, he has saved thousands that other equally affluent citizens have contributed to relieve the sick and hungry and naked during the several winters of famine through which we have passed, since Peter Cooper began the construction of his sham literary institution. ”

“ After she partially recovered, she instituted a suit against Peter, which he resisted through all the Courts for sixteen years, when the Court of Appeals directed Peter to pay his aunt four thousand and five hundred dollars. The instant Peter heard of the Court’s fatal decision, he mounted a fleet horse and reached his aunt’s at midnight, and approached her with these sweet words: “O, my dear aunt, how do you do? I am so glad to see you. I declare, how well and young you look for one so old as you. ”

“ Battey, (from which I had dated my letter,) and took me to Providence in a carriage, and put me in jail as a debtor, on a debt of five hundred dollars, created for the occasion by the wisdom of my father. My father-in-law desired to imprison me as a criminal, (as I had anticipated,) but my father’s counsels prevailed, and I was saved from a felon’s doom. In those days, debtors were incarcerated, and I was confined in a dark cell, by locks, and bars, and bolts, as all Providence feared I would escape, and kill my father and father-in-law, and perhaps others. ”

“ Although my father-in-law was worth several hundred thousand dollars, he had let me have but twenty-five dollars before or since my marriage, and when he placed this amount in my hand, he sneeringly exclaimed: “I always like to help the unfortunate.” In view of all this, I loathed my father-in-law, and loved my father, and wrote a fearful letter to both, (superscribing it to the former,) threatening [4] to visit Providence, and tear their hearts out if they did not instantly relieve me. ”

“ And thus one event (even the whim of a drunkard) often shadows or illuminates our pathway to ceaseless adversity or prosperity, or to eternal obscurity or immortality.
The Hon. Horace Greeley was so poor when he published the New Yorker, that he could not pay his Wheat Bread Board, and even failed to pay his Unbolted Wheat, or Graham Bread Board. I boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Greeley for seven years at the old Graham House in Barclay street, and (sometime after Greeley established the Tribune) Mrs. Greeley often borrowed money of me, from one shilling to five dollars. ”

“ Abel is a native of Warren, Rhode Island, and established the Philadelphia Ledger after the Baltimore Sun. In earlier years, Mr. Abel and myself often worked side by side as compositors in Providence, Boston, and New York.] I worked a few days in Baltimore, and arrived in Washington just prior to the [6] extra Session of Congress in 1837, and obtained a situation in the job office of Gales & Seaton, through the influence of their bookkeeper, Levi Boots, who was a room-mate of mine when I worked and boarded with Wm. Greer, of the Washington Globe, during my residence in Washington in 1830. ”

“ States for the Southern District of New York.
c2
Life of Stephen H. Branch.
While pursuing my studies at Andover, I am corresponding with a girl who resides in my native city. There were girls in Providence far more beautiful than her, (and whose parents were more affluent than hers,) from whom I could doubtless have selected a companion for life, but her father had been a boy with my father, and she loved me as a sister her brother, or as a fond mother loves her precious offspring. These truths had their influence with me. ”

“ It is the custom of these editors to unite and crush those who dare oppose [8] them, and expose their crimes, by refusing to let the wholesale newspaper venders have the Herald, Tribune, and Times, if they sell the public journals of their adversaries. ”

“ My grandfather, on the mother’s side, left Connecticut forty years ago, in consequence of extreme melancholy, after his wife’s demise, and buried himself in the wilderness of Groveland, and wrote to none of his kindred for twenty years. He first worked on a farm, and as the country became more populous, he taught school and realized enough to buy him a farm from the famous Mr. ”