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CHAPTER II |
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RIVER COMMERCE
"And de wheel goes round and round." Steamboat melody "The Glendy Burk." —Stephen Foster
I.
S
OME thirteen years later5 on an afternoon late
in the year 1846., Stephen Foster again stood at the rail of the daily Pittsburgh-Cincinnati packet, scanning the Cincinnati waterfront for the long frame building which housed the commission office of Irwin & Foster. He was twenty now, a slender youth a trifle below the medium stature.1 While not the romantic figure which our motion pictures of today have represented him, he had a fine head and eyes that were "very dark and very large"1 and a charm of manner which continued until his last unhappy days. Stephen's formal education was over; it had been obtained in Pennsylvania schools— Athens Academy and Towanda Academy, followed by a very brief stay at Jefferson College where his grandfather had been a trustee and his father a student, Stephen's heart had not been in his books but in that art for which his father said, with something of a sigh, "he possesses a strange talent." It was quite frankly to cause him to forsake music for |
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