his mists, and every evening from his royal panoply of gilded clouds, the old Connecticut River rolling by, and the Connecticut Valley meadows and New Hampshire hills over which to roam, and gather strawberries and wild-flowers," passed the happy childhood of Salmon Portland Chase.

CHAPTER II.

REMOVAL TO KEENE HIS FATHER'S DEATH-RECOLLECTIONS OF KEENE-AT SCHOOL AT WINDSOR-JOURNEY TO OHIO-NIAGARA FALLS CLEVELAND- THE FERRY-BOY "-ARRIVAL AT WORTHINGTON.

WHE

HEN Mr. Chase was about eight years old his father removed from Cornish to Keene in Cheshire, and dwelt there in a house belonging to his father-in-law, Alexander Ralston. "I remember one spring and one summer in that house," writes Mr. Chase; "the spring by the melting of the snow and the rush of the surface-waters into the Ashuelot, and the summer by a ridiculous attempt I made to dry up a small pool by building a fire upon an extemporized raft and setting it afloat upon the water. I had somehow lost my shoe in the pool, and knowing that water could be dried up by heat, undertook to recover my shoe in that way. But I soon abandoned the attempt.

"I have a dim recollection of the district school-there were several in the town-as a dark room with a great many boys in it, on our side of the street between my father's and the meeting-house. One day I got into a fight with a neighbor boy, the only personal fight I ever was in. He threw a brick or stone at me; I closed upon him, but, as we were soon parted, there were no serious consequences. I remember I did not want to fight, but thought a crisis had come (though I did not know the word then), and that I must hit him-which I did."

Not long after going to Keene, in August, 1817, Ithamar Chase was attacked by paralysis, and after lingering some days in unconsciousness, died surrounded by his family. He was a

noted man in the little community, and honorably known in the State; a leading member of the Masonic fraternity; the friend of Jeremiah Mason of Boston, and of Daniel Webster, then a rising young lawyer and member of Congress; and, in the elaborate style of the times, was addressed as the "Honorable Ithamar Chase, Esq.;" titles in which, remarks Mr. Chase, "my mother took an innocent pleasure, mixed perhaps with a little pride." Through the inheritance of his wife, Jannette Ralston, he had come into the possession of considerable property-for those days-in Keene, and had invested a portion of it in the establishment of a glass factory; but with the close of the war came a revision of the tariff; customs duties were lowered; there was a restoration of foreign trade and importation of foreign glass; prices fell upon home production, so that the factory proved a serious loss, and the business affairs of Ithamar Chase had fallen into some disorder even before his death. When the estate was finally settled, Mrs. Chase retained but a remnant of her property. As soon as she could arrange to do so, she removed with her family to a yellow "story-and-a-half" house, at the corner of Main Street and the Swanzey road to Boston. "A guide-post, which stood opposite," says Mr. Chase, "read:

To SWANZEY 7 MILES,' and' To BOSTON 77 MILES,' and often sent my young imagination to the neighboring town and the great city. It seemed very far off and very huge. My eldest sister was married in that house in 1818, and from that house my brother Dudley, a youth of perhaps sixteen years, went away to sea. He shipped at Boston, and how anxiously we all followed the course of the vessel! We heard of her in the Mediterranean, at Barcelona; then in other seas and in other ports. Finally, two or three years after, we learned that he had left the ship and died at Demerara, South America. His was the first death among my brothers and sisters, and there were eleven of us.

"There was a small farm connected with my mother's house, along one side of which ran a lane back to the hills, bordering the little farm for near a half-mile. As I was going along it one cold morning in the late fall or early winter I received a lesson I have never forgotten. By the roadside was a man lying stark dead. His face lay downward in the shallow water of the road

AT SCHOOL AT WINDSOR.

9

side ditch. He had been in town the night before; had got drunk, and in seeking his way to his house on the hill-side, had probably fallen forward into the water, not deep enough to reach to his ears, and unable to move had perished. Some neighbors came and removed the body, and the Rev. Mr. Barstow, before temperance societies were established, preached a sermon on the evils of intemperance; but what sermon could rival in eloquence the awful spectacle of a dead drunkard, miserably perishing where the slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save!

"We lived at Keene nearly three years after my father's death before I went West, and during that time I passed several months, including a part if not the whole of one winter at Windsor, at school under charge of Colonel Dunham. Here I began Latin in good earnest, and was a diligent scholar. It was here, too, that I got my first notions of political parties. Colonel Dunham had been an editor, and in the attic of his house were still kept files of his newspaper, the Washingtonian, I believe, or the Columbian-fiercely Federal in sentiment. I had learned from my mother that the newspapers were not to be implicitly relied upon, and did not receive the statements of the Washingtonian with absolute belief; but certainly after reading it my impressions of James Madison and his supporters were not of a flattering kind.

"I went through the Latin grammar at Colonel Dunham's; through "Historia Sacra," through a great part of "Viri Romæ,' and began to read the "Bucolics" of Virgil. I was counted quite a prodigy, but I am now sure that thorough instruction in one-quarter as much would have been better than superficial coursing through the whole.

"There was a boy among us who stood at the head of us all for talent and general capacity. After a various experience— preacher, author, lawyer perhaps he yielded to the seductions of intemperance, and he grew to be an old man, but older in wear and impairment than in years. One day he came into my library at Washington, feeble, ill-clad, and almost hopeless, and asked for help. I gave him some money and employment in the Treasury Department, and thought he was saved. But the liquor-devil was too strong: after some months he gave way;

and again

was excused-gave way again, and was again excused; gave way, and was dismissed. There was no help for it.

"I think it was in 1818-'19 that I was at Mr. Dunham's. After my return to Keene I recited to Rev. Mr. Barstow, and with him I began Greek, going through the grammar and making some progress in the Greek Testament. I also took up

Euclid. I am not likely to forget the first proposition. Nobody explained any thing to me, and I had not the least idea of what was to be done. I knew I had a lesson to get, and I got it. I did not know that any thing was to be reasoned and proved, and I neither reasoned nor proved-but simply committed the proposition to memory. I was not long in finding out, however, what problems and theorems meant, and went to work then in the right way, and not unsuccessfully."

And now happened an important event in the student's life. His uncle, Philander Chase, the Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, made a visit at his mother's, and discerning in his nephew those qualities of strictness and application which are after all the surest foundations of eminence, soon after his return to Ohio wrote Mrs. Chase, proposing to receive her son into his own household at Worthington. After some natural hesitation she consented, and in April, 1820, the lad began his journey to the West. "I tried to find out where I was going," he writes, " and got some queer information. The Ohio,' as the country was then called, was a great way off; it was very fertile; cucumbers grew on trees! there were wonderful springs, whose waters were like New-England rum! deer and wolves were plenty, and people few. A copy of Morse's 'Gazetteer' gave somewhat better but still scanty information."

He began his journey in charge of his elder brother, Alexander Ralston Chase, who was going West with the expectation of joining General Cass's expedition into the Indian country. This brother was in company with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who afterward became so distinguished.

The journey to Buffalo was uneventful. At Black Rock, near the city, they were to take the steamer, the Walk-in-the-Water, for Cleveland, but were somewhat delayed by reason of ice in the lake. Meantime, while so detained, Alexander Ralston Chase and Mr. Schoolcraft having gone on a visit to Niagara, Mr.