He was formed by nature to be an antagonist; and youth is an antagonist regardless of remote consequences. At West Point he would have battled for his hereditary tenets against all who had questioned them. At Waterville, nothing pleased him better than to measure logic with the staunchest doctor of them all. It chanced toward the close of his college course, that the worthy president of the institution delivered a course of lectures upon miracles, maintaining these two propositions: 1. If the miracles are true, the gospel is of Divine origin and authority. 2. The miracles are true, because the apostles, who must have known whether they were true or false, proved their belief in their truth by their martyrdom. At the close of each discourse, the lecturer invited the class to offer objections. Young Butler seized the opportunity with alacrity, and plied the doctor hard with the usual arguments employed by the heterodox. He did not fail to furnish himself with a catalogue of martyrs who had died in the defense, and for the sole sake of dogmas now universally conceded to be erroneous. All religions, he said, boasted their army of martyrs; and martyrdom proved nothing-not even the absolute sincerity of the martyr. And as to the apostles, Peter notoriously denied his Lord, Thomas was an avowed skeptic, James and John were slain to please the Jews, and the last we heard of Paul was, that he was living in his own hired house, commending the government of Nero. The debate continued day after day, our youth cramming diligently for each encounter, always eager for the fray. He chanced to find in the village a copy of that armory of unbelief, "Taylor's Diegesis of the New Testament;" and from this, he and his comrades secretly drew missives to let fly at the president after lecture. The doctor maintained his ground ably and manfully, little thinking that he was contending, not with a few saucy students, but with the accumulated skeptical ingenuity of centuries.

All this, I need scarcely say, was mere intellectual exercise and sport. The youth came out of college as good a Christian as he went in. Christianity, hardened down into a system of opinions, has long been an object of criticism; every young and fearless intellect, during the last century and a half, has tried itself upon it. Christianity, as a controller of action, as organized Virtue, as the benign inspirer of motives, as the tamer of the human savage, as the weekly monitor and rest, rescuer of a whole day in seven from the

every unabbre

routine of toil, ten years of possible millennium in viated life-who has ever quarreled with that? I suppose our student would have heartily subscribed the remark of John Adams, in one of those delightful letters of his old age to Mr. Jefferson, upon the materialistic controversy. "You and I," said the old man, "have as much authority to settle these disputes as Swift, Priestley, Dupuis, or the Pope; and if you will agree with me, we will issue our bull, and enjoin it upon all these gentlemen to be silent, until they can tell us what matter is, and what spirit is, and, in the meantime, to observe the commandments and the Sermon on the Mount."

His college course was done. He would have graduated with honor, if his standing as a scholar had not been lost through his delinquencies as a rebel. As it was, it was touch-and-go, whether he could be permitted to graduate at all. He was, however, assigned a low place in the graduating class, and bore off as good a piece of parchment as the best of them. He had outlived his early preference for the medical profession. In one of his last years at college, he had witnessed in court a well-contested trial, and as he marked with admiration the skillful management of the opposing counsel, and shared the keen excitement of the strife, he said to himself: "This is the work for me." He left college in debt, and with health impaired. He weighed but ninety-seven pounds. In all the world, there was no one to whom he could look for help, save himself alone.

Yet, in the nick of time, he found a friend who gave him just the aid he needed most. It was an uncle, captain of a fishing schooner, one of those kind and brave old sailors of Yankee land, who, for two hundred years, have roamed the northern seas in quest of something to keep the pot boiling on the rock-bound shores of Home. The good-hearted captain observed the pale visage and attenuated form of his nephew. "Come with me, lad, to the coast of Labrador, and heave a line this summer. I'll give you a bunk in the cabin, but you must do your duty before the mast, watch and watch, like a man. I'll warrant you'll come back sound enough in the fall." Thus, the ancient mariner. The young man went to the coast of Labrador; hove a line; ate the flesh and drank the oil of cod; came back, after a four months' cruise, in perfect health, and had not another sick day in twenty years. His constitution developed into

the toughest, the most indefatigable compound of brain, nerve and muscle lately seen in New England. A gift of twenty thousand dollars had been a paltry boon in comparison with that bestowed upon him by this worthy uncle.

He returned to Lowell in his twentieth year, and took hold of life with a vigorous grasp. The law office which he entered as a student was that of a gentleman who spent most of his time in Boston, and from whom he received not one word of guidance or instruction; nor felt the need of one. He read law with all his might, and began almost immediately to practice a little in the police courts of Lowell, conducting suits brought by the factory girls against the mill corporations, and defending petty criminal cases; glad enough to earn an occasional two dollar fee. The presiding justice chanced to be a really learned lawyer and able man, and thus this small practice was a valuable aid to the student. Small indeed were his gains, and sore his need. One six months of his two years' probation, he taught a public school in Lowell, in order to procure decent clothing; and he taught it well, say his old pupils. What with his school, his law studies, and his occasional practice, he worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four.

At this time he joined the City Guard, a company of that Sixth regiment of Massachusetts militia, so famous in these years for its bloody march through Baltimore. Always fond of military pursuits and exercises, he has served in every grade—private, corporal, sergeant, third lieutenant, second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, major, lieutenant-colonel, colonel, and brigadier-general; making it a point to hold every one of these positions in due succession. For many years, the drills, parades and annual encampings of his regiment were the only recreation for which he would find leisure—much to the wonder of his professional friends, who were wont, in the old, peaceful times, to banter him severely upon what seemed to them a rather ridiculous foible. "What a fool you are," they would say, "to spend so much time in marching around town in soldier-clothes!" This young gentleman, however, was one of those who take hold of life as they find it; not disdaining the duties of a citizen of a free country, but rejoicing in them, and making them serve his purposes, as they should. There is a 'set' in Massachusetts who hold aloof from the homely, vigorous life around them, contemplating the world from library windows, and reserving

all their sympathies for other and distant civilizations-to their own infinite and irreparable damage. Our young student-at-law was not, and could not be one of these. He took much of his knowledge, not diluted and corrupted by literary decoction, but at the original sources in the street, the police court, the school-room, the political meeting, the parade ground, and grew, at least, robust upon that fresh, substantial fare.

A trifling incident of these early years marks at once the Yankee and the man. That every-day wonder of the modern world, a locomotive, was then first seen at Lowell. Many of us remember seeing our first locomotive, and how we comported ourselves on the interesting occasion. Our young lawyer behaved thus: In company with his friend, the engineer, he visited the wondrous engine at its own house, and spent five hours in studying it, questioning both it and its master until he understood the why and the wherefore of every part, and felt competent to navigate the machine to Boston. This small anecdote contains the essence of old New England; which is expressed, also, in one of the country exclamations: "I want to know!"

I thought I had a very pretty story to tell here of the manner in which our young student-at-law won the affections of the Lowell mill-girls: How one of the girls brought a suit against a wealthy corporation of mill-owners for a small sum of disputed wages, and employed Mr. B. F. Butler to prosecute her claim: How he looked about the mills of the company to find a piece of property to "attach," of "about the value" of the amount demanded: How he could not attach the real estate of the company, because that would have entailed upon him the necessity of giving a bond for an odd million or so, which neither he nor his client could do; and how the same difficulty arose when he proposed to lay the sheriff's paralyzing hand upon the looms, or even upon one of them: How he fixed, at length, upon the water-wheel of the principal mill, and placed a keeper in charge of the same, to forbid its making a single revolution until his client was satisfied: How the managers of the mill were brought to reflection by this maneuver, and hastened to compromise with the girl; and how the ingenuity and audacity of the young student called the attention of the whole community of girls to his talents, and caused him to be employed in all their

little suits against the mill-owners, and so gave him an excellent start in his profession.

The story has been told and printed a thousand times, and it is to this day one of the stock anecdotes of Lowell. General Butler informs me, however, that the story is totally destitute of truth. No event at all resembling it has ever occurred in his career. Moreover, the ruse is a legal impossibility.

In 1840, being then twenty-two years of age, he was admitted to the bar. An early incident brought him into favor with some of the mill-owners. There was a strike among his friends and patrons, the girls; two or three thousand of whom assembled in a grove near Lowell, to talk over their grievances and organize for their redress. They invited the young lawyer to address them, and he accepted the invitation. It was a unique position for a gentleman of twenty-two, not wanting in the romantic element, to stand before an audience of three thousand young ladies, the well-instructed daughters of New England farmers and mechanics. He gave them sound advice, such as might have come from an older head. Admitting the justice of their claims, he showed the improbability of their obtaining them at a time when labor was abundant, and places in the mills were sought by more girls than could be employed. The mill-owners, he said, could, at that time, allow their mills to stand idle for a considerable period without serious loss-perhaps, even with advantage; but could the girls afford to lose any considerable part of a season's wages? Strikes were always a doubtful, often a desperate measure, and entailed suffering upon the operatives a thousand times greater than the evils for which they sought redress. The time might come when a strike would be the only course left them; but, at present, he counseled other measures. He concluded by strongly advising the girls to return to their work, and endeavor by remonstrance, and, if that failed, by appeals to the legislature, to procure a shorter day and juster compensation. The girls took his advice and returned to work.

The day's work in the mills was then thirteen hours-a literally killing period. Thirteen hours a day in a mill means this: incessant activity from five in the morning until nine in the evening the year round. It means a tired and useless Sunday. It means torpidity or death to all the nobler faculties. It means a white and bloated face, a diseased and languid body, a premature death. As much as