The precise cause of his leaving his native hearth-stone is unknown.  The fact is certain that he did leave it, when only ten or twelve years old, and sailed, a poor cabin-boy, to the West Indies.  This was his starting-point in life.  Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to build his fortune.  He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor, unfriended, and unknown.  That from such a cheerless beginning he should rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of the marvels of human history.

His first step was to gain the confidence of his superiors, not so much by affability and courtesy—­for of these social virtues he was never possessed—­as by steady good conduct, fidelity to his employers, temperance, and studied effort to do his humble duties well.  Whatsoever his hands found to do he did with his might.  As a consequence, we find him, in a few years, in high favor with a Captain Randall, of New York, who always spoke of him as “my Stephen,” and who promoted him from one position to another, until he secured him the command of a small vessel, and sent him on trading voyages between the ports of New York and New Orleans.  That the poor cabin-boy should rise, by his own merits, in some six or seven years, to be the commander of a vessel was success such as few lads have ever won with such slender means and few helps as were within reach of young Girard.

When only nineteen, we find him in Philadelphia, driving a thrifty but quiet trade in a little shop in Water Street.  Shortly after opening this store, his fancy was taken captive by a maiden of sixteen Summers, named Mary, but familiarly called Polly, Lum.  She was a shipwright’s daughter, a pretty brunette, who was in the habit of going to the neighboring pump, barefooted, “with her rich, glossy, black hair hanging in disheveled curls about her neck.”  Her modesty pleased him, her beauty charmed him, and, after a few months of rude courtship, he was married to her, in 1770.

His marriage, instead of carrying happiness into the home over which he installed his beautiful bride, only embittered two lives.  It was a union of mere fancy on his side, and of self-interest on hers, not of genuine affection.  Their dispositions were not congenial.  She was ignorant, vulgar, slovenly.  He was arbitrary, harsh, rude, imperious, unyielding.  How could their lives flow on evenly together?  It was impossible.  The result was misery to both, and, as we shall see hereafter, the once beautiful Polly Lum ended her days in a mad-house—­a sad illustration of the folly of premature, ill-assorted marriages.

Finding little at his fireside to move his heart, Girard gave his whole soul to business, now trading to San Domingo and New Orleans, and then in his store in Water Street.  When the Revolutionary War began, it swept his commercial ventures from the ocean, but he, still bent on gain and indifferent as to the means of winning it, then opened a grocery, and engaged in bottling cider and claret.  When the British army occupied Philadelphia, he moved this bottling business to Mount Holly, in New Jersey, where he continued until the American flag again floated over Independence Hall.