rprise, and breathing the soul and spirit of New England
hardihood, comprehending all perils, and encountering all. If, in our
country, valor were rewarded by heraldic honor, this phrase--which it
seems so easy to speak, but which only he, with such a task of danger
and glory before him, has ever spoken--would be the best and fittest
of all mottoes for the General's shield of arms.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health,
to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike
himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and
abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. The accidents of
my life have often afforded me this advantage, but never with more
fulness and variety than during my continuance in office. There was
one man, especially, the observation of whose character gave me a new
idea of talent. His gifts were emphatically those of a man of
business; prompt, acute, clear-minded; with an eye that saw through
all perplexities, and a faculty of arrangement that made them vanish,
as by the waving of an enchanter's wand. Bred up from boyhood in the
Custom-House, it was his proper field of activity; and the many
intricacies of business, so harassing to the interloper, presented
themselves before him with the regularity of a perfectly comprehended
system. In my contemplation, he stood as the ideal of his class. He
was, indeed, the Custom-House in himself; or, at all events, the
main-spring that kept its variously revolving wheels in motion; for,
in an institution like this, where its officers are appointed to
subserve their own profit and convenience, and seldom with a leading
reference to their fitness for the duty to be performed, they must
perforce seek elsewhere the dexterity which is not in them. Thus, by
an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-filings, so did
our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody
met with. With an easy condescension, and kind forbearance towards our
stupidity,--which, to his order of mind, must have seemed little short
of crime,--would he forthwith, by the merest touch of his finger, make
the incomprehensible as clear as daylight. The merchants valued him
not less than we, his esoteric friends. His integrity was perfect: it
was a law of nature with him, rather than a choice or a principle; nor
can it be otherwise than the main condition of an intellect so
remarkably clear and accurate as his, t