office in the army, when he was about eighteen, he not only
declined that, but he also refused to train when warned, and was fined
for it. He then resolved that he would never have anything to do with
any war, unless it were a war for liberty.

When the troubles in Kansas began, he sent several of his sons thither
to strengthen the party of the Free State men, fitting them out with
such weapons as he had; telling them that if the troubles should
increase, and there should be need of his, he would follow, to assist
them with his hand and counsel. This, as you all know, he soon after
did; and it was through his agency, far more than any other's, that
Kansas was made free.

For a part of his life he was a surveyor, and at one time he was engaged
in wool-growing, and he went to Europe as an agent about that business.
There, as everywhere, he had his eyes about him, and made many original
observations. He said, for instance, that he saw why the soil of England
was so rich, and that of Germany (I think it was) so poor, and he
thought of writing to some of the crowned heads about it. It was because
in England the peasantry live on the soil which they cultivate, but in
Germany they are gathered into villages, at night. It is a pity that he
did not make a book of his observations.

I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in respect for the
Constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery he
deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe.

He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great
common-sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold
more so. He was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once,
on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer and higher
principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as there. It was no
abolition lecturer that converted him. Ethan Allen and Stark, with whom
he may in some respects be compared, were rangers in a lower and less
important field. They could bravely face their country's foes, but he
had the courage to face his country herself, when she was in the wrong.
A Western writer says, to account for his escape from so many perils,
that he was concealed under a "rural exterior"; as if, in that prairie
land, a hero should, by good rights, wear a citizen's dress only.

He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she
is. He was not fed on the pap that is there f