To this uncouth form, add
a repulsive face, wrinkled, cold, colorless, and stony, with one eye
dull and the other blind--a "wall-eye." His expression is that of a man
wrapped in the mystery of his own hidden thoughts. He looks--
"Like monumental bronze, unchanged his look--
A soul which pity never touched or shook--
Trained, from his lowly cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Unchanging, fearing but the charge of fear--
A stoic of the mart, a man without a tear."
Such a man was Stephen Girard, one of the most distinguished merchants
in the annals of commerce, and the founder of the celebrated Girard
College in Philadelphia. Let us briefly trace his history and observe
his character.
Girard was a Frenchman by birth, born in the environs of Bordeaux, in
May, 1750, of obscure parents. His early instruction was very limited;
and, being deformed by a wall-eye, he was an object of ridicule to the
companions of his boyhood. This treatment, as is supposed by his
biographer, soured his temper, made him shrink from society, and led him
to live among his own thoughts rather than in mental communion with his
fellows.
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.
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