the habit of reciting his lessons for the day, before going to school, to a young lady visiting the family.' Pleased with his aptness and manly bearing, she said to him one morning, tapping him on the cheek: "If you keep on in this way, you'll be President some day, sir." "I mean

to try for it," he answered firmly. General Colfax watched him with interest, but seems to have had no higher views for him than a clerkship in a store or bank. He asks Mrs. Colfax in a letter of July, 1833, 'if it is not most time my son Schuyler was put into a store? George C. Baldwin [a cousin] was younger when he went to live with Mr. Moore, and is now esteemed to be one of the most promising young men in Paterson. Schuyler, with like advantages, would do as well." But his mother kept him in school a year longer.

Among her intimate friends was Colonel Ralph Clark, of Argyle, near Saratoga. In a letter to Miss Evelyn, daughter of Colonel Clark, a little girl of his own age, dated November 16th, 1833, young Schuyler says: "I am getting on with Latin and French, and have just begun to study algebra." And in May, 1834, Mrs. Colfax writes to Miss Evelyn for him: "He wishes to be remembered affectionately to you, and regrets that he will not be able to accept your kind invitation to make you a visit; his time is completely occupied with going to school and his lesThese two young correspondents, often playmates from the frequent exchange of visits between the families, were nominally betrothed by their parents, and Mrs. Colfax always addressed Evelyn as "daughter."

Meanwhile Mrs. Stryker had removed from No. 214 Broadway to corner of Broadway and Liberty streets, and thence to Brooklyn, where, on the 6th of November, 1834, the Widow Colfax was married to Mr. George W. Matthews. He was a native of Baltimore, and the eldest of a large family of children, whose parents had removed to Ohio, leaving him with his uncle, Mr. Leonard Matthews,

1. Mrs. Glorvina Fort. She died in Philadelphia since this was written.

2. He afterward educated himself, studied for the ministry, is now, and for many years has been, Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Troy, N. Y.

who virtually adopted him. His family and connections were of the best people of Baltimore and New Orleans. Young Schuyler was between eleven and twelve years of age when his father was restored to him, as it were, by this second marriage of his mother. Mr. Matthews was but fourteen years the elder. In a few years they had become brothers rather than father and son, and when his stepfather died in 1874, the stepson wrote of him: "He was the best man of all the many I ever knew."

A wholesome atmosphere pervaded his home. Fifty years afterward Mr. Colfax wrote of his mother: "Every year I feel more and more how much I owe to that dearest of all mothers-in temperament, constitution, endurance of fatigue, activity, comparative contentment, habits, but best of all, sympathetic and conscientious feelings. The buffetings of life that have come to me could scarcely have been endured but for what I owe to her." And of the influences that in part moulded him when a boy, he told the following in the Sunday-school of the church of which he was a member in South Bend: "Just fifty years ago this fall, in a large city by the sea-shore, nearly a thousand miles from here, a lady whose husband was dead took her little boy by the hand, and led him to the Sabbathschool. For thirty years afterward he was a scholar or a teacher of the Sabbath-school, and he has never forgotten those instructions of his youth. The lady who took her little boy to that Sabbath-school is now in a happier land than this, but the boy is still living. That lady was my beloved mother, who is with her Father and Saviour in heaven, and that little boy was myself. To-day I come to this school with my little boy, and his mother with us, that we may place his imperfect steps in the same path in which my mother placed my little feet half a century ago. And may God grant that the impressions made upon his young mind here may remain with him through all his life, and bring forth good fruit abundantly in his life, and words, and deeds."

Mrs. Stryker, the third in the family group, is spoken of by her nieces in New York and New Jersey as a saint

let down from heaven for a little while, and then drawn right up again." Tall, straight, slender, she never weighed a hundred pounds, and although the greater part of her life a hard-working woman, she had always a sweet voice and the springing step of a girl of sixteen. Mentally strong, high-spirited, high-minded, conscientious, and devout, withal softened by unusual trials, her ways impressed the young people about her, and her sayings became family traditions. Her daughter and grandson lived with her till this new marriage; now and henceforth, until she died on Terre Coupee Prairie, in 1857, she lived with her daughter.' High views of life, the heritage of good birth, and the essence of good breeding were the only ones presented to young Colfax in his home.

Mr. Matthews engaged in business in New York, and the lad of eleven began life as clerk in his stepfather's store. His studies now were not so much in books as in what was going on around him, and particularly in politics, in regard to which he manifested an interest, a knowledge, and sentiments very extraordinary in one so young. Going out to the Raritan by stage on one occasion, he so nettled his mother's cousin, Dr. Peter Vroom, that the latter replied: "You ought to be in the nursery instead of talking politics!'' Years afterward he alluded to this in a characteristic letter to Mrs. Woodhull, of Camden, N. J., to wit: "What a saddening blow has fallen on your yearly diminishing family circle in the death of your brother Peter! I

1. On the 8th of February, 1857, Mrs. Stryker wrote a letter to Mrs. Evelyn Colfax, which closed as follows: " Hope in the Hearer of Prayer. Hope leads us on, nor quits us till we die. I wish I could write more, but I am tired. Tell Schuyler to be careful of his health. He is a precious branch of a vile stock [Congress]. God bless him and spare him to do much good for His glory and for his country. Good-by, dear children. Grandma the Great.'" She had just become a great-grandmother.

The next night she died. Colfax's mother wrote him: "She was unconscious from the time she went to sleep, for the cover was on her and tucked around her just as Carrie fixed it the night before, and she never moved a limb or a muscle of her face. The doctor says she never suffered."

Colfax closed his letter in reply: "It is singular that her letter to Evelyn was almost entirely in reference to death. The shadow of the coming stroke seemed to be cast across her mind as she wrote, and the last line was a blessing on the grandson whose footsteps she had so carefully noted from the cradle. Dear old grandma! With her frail body before my mental vision now, I only remember that she had more than her share of sorrow in life, and that she loved us all most dearly."

remember him so well in my boyhood days, when he was a farmer on the Raritan, and you and I used to dig calamus together in the bygone days that are never to return. How, boy that I was, I used to argue politics with him, once in a stage on our road thither, when only ten years old; how, in spite of it all, the affection on both sides was unbroken as I grew up; how he crossed two rivers to hear me lecture at Beecher's Church several years ago on 'The Duties of Life,' and told me he would have given five dollars to have had his young boys hear my counsel; how I met him often after we came to see eye to eye on national matters; how he called on me several times at Washington when visiting the New Jersey soldiers in the Potomac army— these and many other things have been before my mind to-day."

1

One of his New Jersey cousins writes: "My first recollection of my dear Cousin Schuyler is when he was about twelve years old, and came with my dear Aunt Hannah to visit us at the old Pompton homestead. We children stood in awe of him when he would leave us at play with the little negroes, and seat himself with my grandfather and other gentlemen, and not only listen to them as they talked politics, but would join in their conversation." Always about the polls election days, on the occasion of one important election he was missed at home till midnight. He had waited at the Third Ward Poll in New York-the decisive poll by the way-to get the result; had obtained it, and had the satisfaction on his return to Brooklyn of being able to give the information for which everybody was eagerly inquiring. He had an instinct for news, and a newspaper fascinated him. His diary of these times, still extant, indicates a playful, fun-loving disposition; not greatly inclined to severe application of any kind; hailing with delight his vacations among his cousins in the country; not addicted to moralizing, but observant, active, and disposed to arrive in his own way at his own conclusions. He was already a commentator, after the style of the daily editor of to-day, on passing events, comparing

1. Mrs. Mary Baldwin Graves, of Grand Rapids, Mich.

and criticising the news reports and editorials of the journals of the city and the talk of the street and countingroom. Upon what he might or would have been in the peculiar politics of his native city, it would be idle to speculate, for at the age of thirteen he was transplanted into a different and a more congenial field.

In the fall of 1836 the family removed West, travelling via the Hudson River and the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and thence by steamer to Detroit. From Detroit they took wagon, emigrant fashion, and were thirteen days reaching New Carlisle, Ind., on the Michigan (State) Road, about equidistant from South Bend, Michigan City, and La Porte, with Terre Coupee Prairie on the one hand and Rolling Prairie on the other. All this country between Lake Erie and Lake Michigan was very attractive to the settler, being neither an interminable forest nor a boundless prairie, but a wooded land, with prairies of perfect finish, and perhaps half as large as a township, scattered about through the woods. In its variety of forest, field, lake, and stream, it was a land pleasing to the eye, lacking nothing of perfection but the diversity that comes of mountains. Terre Coupee Prairie appears now as the bottom of a drained lake or marsh, four or five miles in diameter, with wooded shores; a garden in fertility and tilth; the farm buildings half hidden by trees, with sentinel trees standing in the fields like the live oaks of the Pacific. But in 1836 the prairie was bare of trees or fences; and two years prior to the advent of our city emigrants, Richard R. Carlisle's house and the double log-cabin, bought, together with the town site, of the half-breed Bursaw, were the only buildings on "the Hill," as New Carlisle was called. It was a different world from what it is now. Before they moved West Mr. Matthews had crossed the Grand Prairie of Illinois on horseback, there being no other conveyance, and but four houses in a hundred miles. Four years later Chicago had less than five thousand inhabitants. There were few miles of railroad, no telegraphs, few newspapers, fewer labor-saving machines, postage was twenty-five cents a letter-comparatively speaking, it was