528 HENRY PURKITT KIDDER. 



He is remembered with pleasure by his school companions as a 

 kindly, good-uatured boy, willing to play, but as willing to study, con- 

 scientious and unselfish. But I doubt if any of them then knew or 

 guessed that he had the qualities which would make him a leader 

 among his fellow citizens before he died. 



When he left school, he sought and obtained at once a boy's place in 

 the auctioneer's firm of Coolidge and Haskell. Boys trained in the 

 English High School were then, and always have been, favorites 

 among Boston merchants, and this young fellow made good the repu- 

 tation which his comrades had won. From the service of this firm he 

 passed to that of the Boston and Worcester Railroad, in which he was 

 a freight clerk until he was twenty-one years of age. 



He had always wished to see the Western country, as does every 

 young man of spirit in America, and had perhaps dreamed of estab- 

 lishing himself there. So soon, therefore, as he was free to choose his 

 own life and career, he went to New Orleans, where he had a sister 

 married, and from New Orleans went up the Mississippi River to Cin- 

 cinnati, not travelling rapidly, but inquiring from place to place whether 

 there were any need of him. If need there were, it did not show it- 

 self, and he was fond of saying in after life that the best lesson he ever 

 learned, or the best perhaps but one, was that which he taught him- 

 self, or which a kind Providence taught him, when in Cincinnati he 

 found he had expended all his money but a quarter of a dollar, and 

 was, to appearance, no nearer finding his life-work than when he 

 began his adventure. The truth was, that a certain instinctive purity 

 of life made him dislike, with a certain shudder, the low or rough 

 companions whom he was thrown with in the adventures of a young 

 steamboat traveller in " prospecting," and the precise training for accu- 

 rate business which led in fact to the career which he followed in 

 after life was not exactly the discipline which would help him best in 

 the rough give-and-take of life in new communities. However this 

 may be, he came home to Boston, as soon as his friends sent him 

 money for that purpose, wiser than he had started, and poorer, and 

 wholly indisposed from that time to seek his home in other com- 

 munities. 



It was not long before he engaged himself as a junior clerk in tlie 

 banking house of the late Ebenezer Francis, — the same house which 

 was afterwards known as John E. Thayer & Co., and later yet, under 

 Mr. Kidder's lead, took the name it still bears, of Kidder, Peabody, 

 & Co. Mr. Francis had been the treasurer of Harvard College ; he 

 was also the treasurer of the Academy for many years, as was his 



