SKETCH OF ANDREW DICKSON WHITE. 547 



DICKSON WHITE. His grandfather, Asa White, a migrant from 

 southern Massachusetts in 1798, was long the well-to-do miller of 

 the little community, but in 1815 a conflagration brought him in 

 a day to poverty ; and his eldest son Horace, the father of Andrew, 

 was forced, though but a lad of thirteen, to turn from the educa- 

 tion of the schools to that of business. So well he learned its 

 lessons that before the age of thirty he had not only won a repu- 

 tation for unusual mercantile sagacity and enterprise, but had 

 already amassed a moderate fortune when in 1831 he married 

 Clara Dickson, only daughter of a village magnate. Her father, 

 the Hon. Andrew Dickson, like the Whites of Massachusetts 

 birth, had come a young man to Homer and was, in the year of 

 his grand son's advent, the representative of his county in the 

 Legislature of the State. 



The fortunes of Horace White still prospered, and in 1839 he 

 took advantage of the new banking law of the State to establish 

 himself as one of the earliest bankers at Syracuse, the rising 

 metropolis of central New York, then a town of some five thou- 

 sand people. There his energy found a worthier field ; identified 

 with all the interests of his city, he rapidly amassed wealth, and 

 all the advantages his own youth had missed he could well afford 

 his son. 



The earliest tastes of the boy were, however, not bookish ; 

 all his love was for machinery and for the wonders of out of 

 doors ; and, though he early picked up the power to read, it was 

 not until after the removal to Syracuse that he was first put into 

 school. Of his education he has himself told the story : 



" After much time lost in various poor schools, I was sent to 

 the preparatory department of the Syracuse Academy, and there, 

 by good luck, found Joseph A. Allen, the best teacher of English 

 branches I have ever known. . . . He seemed to divine the char- 

 acter and enter into the purpose of every boy." There young 

 White perfected himself in spelling, in arithmetic, in geometry, 

 the only mathematical study he ever loved, in grammar, of which 

 he thinks there was too much ; there he gained the rudiments of 

 natural science and even of music, becoming " proficient enough 

 to play the organ occasionally in church." There, too, literature 

 was first opened to him. " Great attention was given to reading 

 aloud from a book made up of selections from the best authors, 

 and to recitals from these. Thus I stored up not only some of 

 the best things in the older English writers, bat inspiring poems 

 of Whittier, Longfellow, and other moderns," and the treasures 

 thus gained were never lost. " As to the moral side, Mr. Allen 

 influenced many of us strongly by liberalizing and broadening 

 our horizon. He was a disciple at that time of Channing, and an 

 abolitionist; but he ... never made the slightest attempt to 



