When he was sixteen years old he was so well grown and so mature that he passed for twenty.  Having succeeded so well in the management of his English classes, he was offered the position of instructor of Latin, with an increase of his salary.  The offer at first dismayed him.  He was thoroughly ignorant of the Latin language, and utterly unprepared for the duties demanded of him.  He was very anxious to have the place, however, for he needed the increase of salary offered him, and, after hesitating a little while, accepted it.  He purchased a Latin grammar, and engaged a private tutor.  He studied hard, and soon mastered the rudiments of the language.  In this way he managed to keep ahead of his classes.  If a question was asked him which he could not answer, he postponed his reply, looked into the matter at night, and explained it the next morning.  By such hard study and patient efforts did this boy, himself a mere novice, turn out what was admitted by all to be the best drilled Latin class Shepherd Johnson’s school had ever boasted of.

When he was eighteen years old he was made principal of Public School No. 2 of New York.  He was living at Bushwick, where he resided with his mother and sister in a cozy little cottage, the garden of which was his pride, since he tended it with his own hands.  It was his custom to rise every morning at four o’clock, and work in his garden until seven.  Then he rode into the city, and attended to his school duties until four o’clock, when he returned home.

He was now in possession of a comfortable living; but he was not satisfied to do this and nothing more.  He was anxious to win fortune, to enter upon a more active and stirring pursuit, and he kept himself always on the watch for an opening.  About the time he became the head of the public school we have referred to, he commenced to engage in various ventures of a commercial nature, devoting to them his evenings, and the hours of the day not demanded by his school.

One of his relatives was a builder, with a fair trade, and had made some money by erecting houses in New York.  Young Stout, who had saved a little money, proposed to him that they should take out a contract for building a number of dwellings on the then fashionable thoroughfare of East Broadway.  The elder man was pleased with the plan, and at once consented to it.  The houses were built at a handsome profit; others followed them, and by attending closely to this business, as well as his other duties, Andrew Stout, by the time he was twenty years old, had saved seventeen thousand dollars—­a very large sum in those steady-going days.