“because he could not be trusted to do business.”  The same son once modestly asked the Commodore if he would allow him to have the compost that had been for a year accumulating outside the Fifth Avenue barns.  “Just one load, and no more,” said pater.  William thereupon took twenty teams and as many men, and transferred the entire pile to a barge moored in the river.  It was a barge-load.  And when pater saw what had been done, he said, “The boy is not so big a fool as I thought.”  The boy was forty-five ere death put him in possession of the gold that the father no longer had use for, there being no pockets in a shroud, and he then showed that as a financier he could have given his father points, for in a few years he doubled the millions and drove horses faster without a break than his father had ever ridden.

Seward’s father was a doctor, justice of the peace, merchant, and the general first citizen of the village of Florida, Orange County, New York.  And he had no more confidence in his boy William than Vanderbilt had in his.  He educated him only because the lad was not strong enough to work, and it seems to have been the firm belief that the boy would come to no good end.  In order to discipline him, the father put the youngster in college on such a scanty allowance that the lad was obliged to run away and go to teaching school in order to be free from financial humiliation.  Here was the best possible proof that the young man had the germs of excellence in him; but the father took it as a proof of depravity, and sent warning letters to the young school-teacher’s friends threatening them “not to harbor the scapegrace.”

The years went by and the parental distrust slackened very little.  The boy was slim and slender and his hair was tow-colored and his head too big for his body.  He had gotten a goodly smattering of education some way and was intent on being a lawyer.  He seemed to know that if he was to succeed he must get well away from the parent nest, and out of the reach of daily advice.

His desire was to go “Out West,” and the particular objective point was Auburn, New York.

The father gave him fifty dollars as a starter, with the final word, “I expect you’ll be back all too soon.”

And so young Seward started away, with high hopes and a firm determination that he would agreeably disappoint his parents by not going back.

He reached Albany by steamboat, and embarked on a sumptuous canal packet that bore a waving banner on which were the words woven in gold, “Westward Ho!”

And he has slyly told us how, as he stepped aboard that “inland palace,” he bethought him of having written a thesis, three years before, proving that De Witt Clinton’s chimera of joining the Hudson and Lake Erie was an idea both fictile and fibrous.  But the inland palace carried him safely and surely.  He reached Auburn, and instead of writing home for more money, returned that which he had borrowed.  The father, who was a pretty good man in every way, quite beyond the average in intellect, lived to see his son in the United States Senate.