th estate. He became editor of one of Boston's
leading daily newspapers. On the battle-field he saw the movements of
the mightiest armies and navies ever gathered for combat. As a white
lily among war correspondents, he was ever trusted. He not only
informed, but he kept in cheer all New England during four years of
strain. With his pen he made himself a master of English style. He was
a poet, a musician, a traveller, a statesman, and, best of all and
always, a Christian. He travelled around the globe, and then told the
world's story of liberty and of the war that crushed slavery and state
sovereignty and consolidated the Union. With his books he has educated
a generation of American boys and girls in patriotism. He died without
entering into old age, for he was always ready to entertain a new
idea. Let us glance at his name and inheritance. He was well named,
and ever appreciated his heritage. In his Christian, middle, and
family name, is a suggestion. In each lies a story.

"Charles," as we say, is the Norman form of the old Teutonic Carl,
meaning strong, valiant, commanding. The Hungarians named a king Carl.

"Carleton" is the ton or town of Carl or Charles.

"Coffin" in old English meant a cask, chest, casket, box of any kind.

The Latin Cophinum was usually a basket. When Wickliffe translated the
Gospel, he rendered the verse at Matt. xiv. 20, "They took up of that
which remained over of the broken pieces, twelve coffins full."

The name as a family name is still found in England, but all the
Coffins in America are descended from Tristram Coffin, who sailed
from Plymouth, England, in 1642, and in 1660 settled in Nantucket. The
most ancient seat of the name and family of the Coffins in England is
Portledge, in the parish of Alwington. To his house, and last earthly
home, in Brookline, Mass., built under his own eye, and in which
Charles Carleton Coffin died, he gave the name of Alwington.

"Carleton's" grandfather, Peter Coffin, married Rebecca Hazeltine, of
Chester, N. H., whose ancestors had come from England to Salem, Mass.,
in 1637, and settled at Bradford. Carleton has told something of his
ancestry and kin in his "History of Boscawen." In his later years, in
the eighties of this century, at the repeated and urgent request of
his wife, Carleton wrote out, or, rather, jotted down, some notes for
the story of the earlier portion of his life. He was to have written a
volume--had his wife succeeded, after due