Before the appointed time the work was done, and well done.

On his seventeenth birthday he bought the boat, but on his way home it struck a sunken wreck and sank just as he reached shallow water.
But Cornelius Vanderbilt was not the boy to give up.

He at once began again, and in three years saved three thousand dollars.

He often worked all night, and soon had far the largest patronage of any boatman in the harbor.

During the War of 1812 he was awarded the Government contract to carry provisions to the military stations near the metropolis.