passion were blended with an effectiveness which hardly any other American has equaled. The Republican made no such frank admission as to Taylor's deficiencies. It made the best of him, not with extravagant laudation, but with skillful magnifying of his strong points and silence as to the weak ones. In this it followed the fashion of loyal partisanship.

The Whigs won the day. The Southern Whig, Taylor, received 163 electoral votes, and the Northern Democrat, Cass, 127,- drawn in pretty equal proportions from the two sections. Van Buren got no electoral vote; of his popular vote of 290,000, almost a third was drawn from New York state; there and in Massachusetts he had more votes than Cass. The Free-soil party owed its strength largely to a local and temporary feud of the Democracy, which added to it nothing permanent. But it had laid a foundation for the Republican party. At present, the anti-slavery element among the Whigs was strong. Webster and his followers had given only a half-hearted support to Taylor, and were disaffected toward his administration from the first. But Seward was elected to the Senate from New York; and Seward had already declared, in a speech at Cleveland: "Slavery can be limited to its present bounds; it can be ameliorated; and it can be abolished; — and you and I must do it."

CHAPTER VIII.

PERSONAL AND FAMILY LIFE.

HILE a boy in Mr. Eaton's school, Mr. Bowles had met among his fellow-pupils Miss Mary S. D. Schermerhorn, a daughter of H. V. R. Schermerhorn, of Geneva, N. Y., and grand-daughter of James S. Dwight, the leading Springfield merchant of the first quarter of the century. Miss Schermerhorn while attending the school lived in an uncle's family; she had numerous relatives in the town; and when school years were over, the two young people had opportunities for continued acquaintance, which ripened into an engagement. They were married at the bride's home, September 6, 1848. No time for a wedding journey; they were married on Wednesday, and on the following Saturday the editor was back at his post. The young wife identified herself from the first with her husband's interests and aims. Through their thirty years of married life she gave an entire devotion to his comfort and happiness, and was repaid by a loyal affection, and a constant and considerate helpfulness which the most exacting demands of his profession never abated. He had now the resource without which no worker is rightly equipped and no man is a full man. When in his later life he was asked by one of his younger lieutenants the cause of his success, he answered "I married early, and I worked with all my might."

The young couple made their home with the parents. The elder Mrs. Bowles gave a mother's kindness to the young wife, who had lost her own mother while still a child. The son was receiving from his father five hundred dollars a year for his services, and on that sum he and his wife at first lived. After a year or two, a property of $10,000 coming to him, he bought with a portion of this money a part of the block into which the paper had been moved. It had exchanged its first quarters over the Chicopee Bank, on the corner of Main and Elm streets, for rooms on the north-east corner of Market and Sandford streets. For the sum thus invested he received from his father the ownership of one-half of the paper.

After Mr. Stowe had worked with the Republican for a few months, he was called to another position. In his place came Samuel H. Davis, a son of Rev. Dr. Davis, of Westfield. Young Davis was a man of fine parts and good education. In him the young editor found for the first time a thoroughly competent ally in the higher department of his work. He was not only a good writer, but was able and willing to share the responsibility for the executive labor of the paper. The younger Bowles looked hopefully to him as the coming writer of the Republican. So he used to tell his friends, saying that for himself he did not expect to accomplish much as an editorial writer,-the general management of the paper would be his province. Mr. Davis slept in the office, and took his meals with the Bowles family, which included father and son with their wives, the unmarried son, and two or three apprentices. The working day of the younger Samuel Bowles began before noon and lasted till one or two in the morning. His wife shared in the household work, and sometimes late at night went down. to the office; and when there came a little leisure, the

last "copy" having gone to the printers and the proof not yet returned, husband and wife would read aloud to each other from some book. The one leisure evening of the week was Saturday,- Mr. Bowles's ideal of "a paper every day in the year" being unrealized till thirty years later. But in the early spring of 1850, Davis was taken suddenly ill. Mr. Bowles took him home and put him in his own room; a sharp, brief illness followed, and the young life so full of promise came to its end. To Mr. Bowles it was the loss of a brotherly comrade, and the right hand of his enterprise. Whoever might sicken, whoever might die, the daily paper must go on, and go on well. Through these hard days when Davis lay sick, and after his death, its pages were just as full and vigorous as before. The assistant's place was not vacant long. Dr. J. G. Holland, who had just come back to the town after a year or two of teaching and school superintendence at the South, was invited to take the place of associate editor, and entered at once on the work. The first year he was paid $480; the next year, $700; and then there was sold to him a quarter of the paper for $3500. The elder Mr. Bowles had come to be engaged wholly in the affairs of the counting-room. For four or five years the whole editorial work of the paper was done by the younger Bowles and Dr. Holland.

Through these years, Mr. Bowles's family life was eventful. His first child, a daughter, Sarah Augusta, was born in June, 1850. Sometimes, coming home from work after midnight, he would walk the floor with the baby in his arms, to soothe it, so fatigued that he stumbled over the furniture as he walked; but to this his wife soon put a stop by assigning to him a separate room. The second child, a son named after his father, was born in October, 1851; and a second daughter, Mary, in January, 1854.

In the early autumn of 1851 came a succession of bereavements. His sister, Mrs. Julia Foote, lost a child, and died ten days afterward. Ten days later the illness of the elder Mr. Bowles ended in his death. To the son that death brought a great sorrow, and also heavier work. The responsibility of the countingroom came now on him, in addition to the editorial management. The strain was too great; his overtaxed eyes began to suffer, and loss of sight was feared. He went in the spring of 1852 to the home of his sister, Mrs. Henry Alexander, in Brooklyn, to consult New York physicians. In the middle of the night he was attacked by terrible pain in the head; a time of acute suffering followed, from a succession of abscesses in the head; and to this ensued a siege of inflammatory rheumatism. At one time there were fears for his life. His wife was bound at home by the sickness of the two babies; but his mother came to watch beside him. During his convalescence his presence brightened his sister's home. In health he was sometimes irritable, but in sickness he was wonderfully patient. The household remembered the visit with delight. The moment that strength began to return, his keen interest in public affairs revived; and he dictated to his sister many letters about politics. When he went back to Springfield, it was with health still delicate, and for a year or two following he was obliged to use his eyes sparingly. It was not the old home to which he returned. A great project had been consummated during his illness; his own little family had left his mother's and moved into a house of their own. The step had become of clear expedience, but he had shrunk from it somewhat; he hesitated at leaving the mother's roof and encountering the unknown cares and responsibilities of a separate establishment while the burdens of his work were so heavy. But he accepted