lowed his forlorn destiny from his native town
of South Windsor, Connecticut, where he was born on the twenty-first
of January, 1743. His body was buried in the graveyard of Bardstown,
then a frontier village. No one contributed a stone to mark the
grave. Nor has that duty ever been performed. The spot became
undistinguishable as time went by, and we believe that there is not a
man in the world who can point out the place where the body of John
Fitch was buried. The grave of the inventor of the steamboat, hidden
away, more obscurely than that of Jean Valjean in the cemetery of
Pere-Lachaise, will keep the heroic bones to the last day, when all
sepulchres of earth shall set free their occupants and the great sea's
wash cast up its dead!

The life of John Fitch is, we are confident, the saddest chapter in
human biography. The soul of the man seems from the first to have gone
forth darkly voyaging, like Poe's raven,

--"Whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster, till his song one burden bore,
Till the dirges of his hope the melancholy burden bore,--
Of 'Nevermore--nevermore!'"

Certainly it was nevermore with him. His early years were made
miserable by ill-treatment and abuse. His father, a close-fisted
farmer and an elder brother of the same character, converted the
boyhood life of John Fitch into a long day of grief and humiliation
and a long night of gloomy dreams. Then at length came an ill-advised
and ill-starred marriage, which broke under him and left him to wander
forth in desolation.

He went first from Connecticut to Trenton, N.J., and there in his
twenty-sixth year began to ply the humble trade of watch-maker. Then
he became a gunsmith, making arms for the patriots of Seventy-six,
until what time the British destroyed his shop. Then he was a soldier.
He suffered the horrors of Valley Forge; and before the conclusion of
the peace he went abroad in the country as a tinker of clocks and
watches. His peculiarity of manner and his mendicant character made
him the butt of neighborhoods. In 1780 he was sent as a
deputy-surveyor from Virginia into Kentucky, and after nearly two
years spent in the country between the Kentucky and Green rivers, he
went back to Philadelphia. On a second journey to the West his party
was assailed by the Indians at the mouth of the Muskingum, and most
were killed. But he was taken captive, and remained with the red men
for nea