er and furnished the
education which equipped him for the labors and the triumphs of his
life. One cannot read her letters to her son in college without the
deepest emotion. How many such women were there, in the plain ranks of
New England life, in her generation! How many are there now! Paying
marvelous little heed to the discussion of women's rights, they show a
wonderful addiction to the performance of women's duties.

His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the care and
expense of his education, and this drew him to the West, where, under
this tutelage, he pursued academic studies for two years. At the end of
this time he returned to his mother's charge, entered the junior class
of Dartmouth College, and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of
eighteen. The only significance, in its impression on his future life,
of this brief guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining
influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the
forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four
years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student
with Mr. Wirt--then at the zenith of his faculties and his
fame--studying men and manners at the capital, watching the new
questions then shaping themselves for political action, observing the
celebrated statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice
Marshall and his learned associates on the bench of the Supreme Court,
and with Webster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he
was admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established
himself at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his home
from the New England of his family, his birth, his education, and his
love, to the ruder but equally strenuous and more expansive society of
the West.

While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious instruction of
his mother, and his own profound sense of religious obligations under
the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the Episcopal Church as the
body of Christian believers in whose communion he found the best support
for the religious life he proposed to himself. When he left your college
he had not wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of adopting the
clerical profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was simple and
constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and rule of his
life, in devout confidence in the moral government of the wo