were sent to college, he was made to content himself with the barest rudiments of an education, with merely a knowledge of reading and writing.  When he was quite young, his mother died, and, as his father soon married again, the severity of a step-mother was added to his other troubles.  When about thirteen years of age, he left home, with his father’s consent, and began, as a cabin-boy, the life of a mariner.  For nine years he sailed between Bordeaux and the French West Indies, rising steadily from his position of cabin-boy to that of mate.  He improved his leisure time at sea, until he was not only master of the art of navigation, but generally well informed for a man in his station.  His father possessed sufficient influence to procure him the command of a vessel, in spite of the law of France which required that no man should be made master of a ship unless he had sailed two cruises in the royal navy and was twenty-five years old.  Gradually Girard was enabled to amass a small sum of money, which he invested in cargoes easily disposed of in the ports to which he sailed.  Three years after he was licensed to command, he made his first appearance in the port of Philadelphia.  He was then twenty-six years old.

From the time of his arrival in Philadelphia he devoted himself to business with an energy and industry which never failed.  He despised no labor, and was willing to undertake any honest means of increasing his subsistence.  He bought and sold any thing, from groceries to old “junk.”  His chief profit, however, was in his wine and cider, which he bottled and sold readily.  His business prospered, and he was regarded as a thriving man from the start.

In July, 1777, he married Mary Lum, a servant girl of great beauty, and something of a virago as well.  The union was an unhappy one, as the husband and wife were utterly unsuited to each other.  Seven years after her marriage, Mrs. Girard showed symptoms of insanity, which became so decided that her husband was compelled to place her in the State Asylum for the Insane.  He appears to have done every thing in his power to restore her to reason.  Being pronounced cured, she returned to her home, but in 1790 He was compelled to place her permanently in the Pennsylvania Hospital, where, nine months after, she gave birth to a female child, which happily died.  Mrs. Girard never recovered her reason, but died in 1815, and was buried in the hospital grounds.

Girard fled from Philadelphia, with his wife, in September, 1777, at the approach of the British, and purchased a house at Mount Holly, near Burlington, New Jersey, where he carried on his bottling business.  His claret commanded a ready sale among the British in Philadelphia, and his profits were large.  In June, 1778, the city was evacuated by Lord Howe, and he was allowed to return to his former home.