mmand, having
been regularly commissioned by the President of the United States as a
colonel of artillery in the District of Columbia. He might, indeed, have
been called major-general, for in his old age he held that rank in the
militia of the district. And a very fine-looking soldier he must have
been in his prime, judging from the portrait which used to hang in the
library, representing a full-formed man, tall and erect, his handsome
and benevolent countenance set off by an abundance of curly hair.

His library had about the roughest furniture ever seen in an apartment
containing so much that was valuable. As I remember it, it was a long,
low room, with streets and cross-streets of pine book-shelves,
unpainted, all filled with books to their utmost capacity--a wilderness
of books, in print and in manuscript, mostly old and dingy, and almost
all of them relating in some way to American history. The place had a
very musty smell; and as most of its treasures were in the original
bindings, or without bindings, few persons would have suspected the
priceless value of the collection. I am acquainted with a certain
library in New York of several thousand volumes, most of which are bound
resplendently in calf and gold, and the room in which they are kept is
"as splendid as a steamboat," but old Peter Force could show you single
alcoves of his library which, at a fair valuation, would buy out all
that mass of sumptuosity.

It was not always easy to find the old gentleman in his dusty, dingy
wilderness; but when you had discovered him in some remote recess he
would take pleasure in exhibiting his treasures. He would take down his
excellent copy of Eliot's Indian Bible, a book so faithfully made in
every respect that I question if, as a mere piece of book-making, it
could now be matched in the United States. He lived to see this rarity
command in New York the price of fourteen hundred and fifty dollars. He
would show you forty-one works, in the original editions, of Increase
and Cotton Mather, the most recent of which was published in 1735. He
possessed a large number of books printed and bound by Benjamin
Franklin. He had two hundred volumes of the records of Colonial
legislatures. He could show you a newspaper of almost every month--nay,
almost every week, since newspapers were first published in America. He
had in all nine hundred and fifty bound volumes of newspapers, of which
two hundred and forty-five volumes were publishe