[Illustration:  PEABODY PAYING FOR A NIGHT’S LODGING.]

“The interest with which Mr. Peabody remembered this visit to Post Mills is shown by his second visit so late in life, and his gift of a library—­as large a library as that place needs.  Of its influence on his subsequent career, of course, there is no record.  Perhaps it was not much.  But, at least, it gave him a good chance for quiet thinking, at an age when he needed it; and the labors of the farm may have been useful both to mind and body.”

At the age of sixteen, in the year 1811, he went to Newburyport, and became a clerk in the store of his elder brother, David Peabody, who was engaged in the dry goods business at that place.  He exhibited unusual capacity and promise in his calling, and soon drew upon himself the favorable attention of the merchants of the place.  He was prompt, reliable, and energetic, and from the first established an enviable reputation for personal and professional integrity.  It is said that he earned here the first money he ever made outside of his business.  This was by writing ballots for the Federal party in Newburyport.  Printed ballots had not then come into use.

He did not stay long in Newburyport, as a great fire, which burned up a considerable part of the town, destroyed his brother’s store, and obliged him to seek employment elsewhere.  He always retained a warm attachment to the place, however, an attachment which a resident of the town explains as follows: 

“The cause of Mr. George Peabody’s interest in Newburyport was not alone that he had lived here for a brief period, or that his relatives had lived here; but rather it was the warm friendship that had been shown him, which was, in fact, the basis of his subsequent prosperity.  He left here in 1811, and returned in 1857.  The forty-six intervening years had borne to the grave most of the persons with whom he had formed acquaintance.  Among those he recognized were several who were in business, or clerks, on State Street in 1811,—­Messrs. John Porter, Moses Kimball, Prescott Spaulding, and a few others.  Mr. Spaulding was fourteen years older than Mr. Peabody, and in business when the latter was a clerk with his uncle, Colonel John Peabody.  Mr. Peabody was here in 1857, on the day of the Agricultural Fair, and was walking in the procession with the late Mayor Davenport, when he saw Mr. Spaulding on the sidewalk, and at once left the procession to greet him.

“Mr. Spaulding had rendered him the greatest of services.  When Mr. Peabody left Newburyport, he was under age, and not worth a dollar.  Mr. Spaulding gave him letters of credit in Boston, through which he obtained two thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise of Mr. James Reed, who was so favorably impressed with his appearance, that he subsequently gave him credit for a larger amount.  This was his start in life, as he afterward acknowledged; for at a public entertainment in Boston, when his credit