tain any recollection of his smiles or endearments. My surviving parent removed to this State in 1792, leaving me, a boy of fifteen years of age, in the office of the High Court of Chancery in the city of Richmond, without guardian, without pecuniary means of support, to steer my course as I might or could. A neglected education was improved by my own irregular exertions without the benefit of systematic instruction. I studied law, principally in the office of a lamented friend, the late Governor Brooke, then Attorney-General of Virginia, and also under the auspices of the venerable and lamented Chancellor Wythe, for whom I had acted as amanuensis. I obtained a license to practice the profession from the judges of the Court of Appeals of Virginia and established myself in Lexington in 1797, without patrons, without the favor or countenance of the great or opulent, without the means of paying my weekly board, and in the midst of a bar uncommonly distinguished by eminent members. I remember how comfortable I thought I should be if I could make one hundred pounds, Virginia money, per year, and with what delight I received the first fifteen shillings fee. My hopes were more than realized. I immediately rushed into a successful and lucrative practice."

What were the achievements of this poor Mill Boy of the Slashes? He was elected to the General Assembly of the Kentucky Legislature in1803, appointed to the United States Senate to fill a vacancy in that same year; again elected

to the Assembly and chosen Speaker of the House in 1807; again sent to the United States Senate to fill an unexpired term in 1809; elected. to the House of Representatives of the United States in 1811, and five times chosen Speaker of the House; United States Peace Commissioner to Ghent in 1814; re-elected to Congress the next year; retired from public life for a brief

period to retrieve his fortunes; returned to the Senate in 1823; Secretary of State under John Quincy Adams; again in the Senate in 1831; reelected to the Senate in 1836; resigned his seat in 1842; nominated for the Presidency in 1839. and 1844, and re-elected to the Senate in 1849 and 1855. This was the career that opened before the lad who rode to mill from the Slashes and acquired the elements of a common-school education in a log school-house near his birthplace.

His mother married a second time, and his

stepfather, Captain Henry Watkins, a resident of Richmond, started him in life in a retail store in the city of Richmond, but within a year his bookish habits, his divine thirst for knowledge, and his astonishing facility for acquiring almost every variety of information so aroused the admiration of the stepfather that the lad was found a place in the office of the clerk of the High Court of Chancery. Here was where he made his first real beginning in public life. was tall, raw-boned, and lank, with a countenance pleasing but not handsome; and he was clad in garments of homespun which did not improve his personal appearance in the eyes of the town lads among whom he took his place at a desk. where he began copying papers.

He

Later on, when he left Richmond to seek his fortune in Kentucky, then the Far West of the country, Clay did not make his way into conditions of very high civilization. Kentucky was still known as the "Dark and Bloody Ground" of Daniel Boone and the wild aborigines whom he fought; and although the city of Lexington was a centre of social enlightenment for those days and in those regions, it was, as compared with Richmond, a crude and unkempt community. Some years later, in 1814, Amos Kendall, who had migrated from New England to Kentucky in search of profitable employment, wrote in his diary: "I have, I think, learned the way to be popular in Kentucky, but do not as yet put in it practice. Drink whiskey and talk loud with the fullest confidence and you will

hardly fail of being called a clever fellow." But through all these early and boisterous scenes of Clay's life we find him reading-perpetually reading. As he, himself, has said, he lacked that scholarly discipline and system of acquiring knowledge which is essential to the best mental training; but he absorbed knowledge with great avidity and certainly did make the most of his opportunities. Through life,

however, Henry Clay appears to have been somewhat superficial, and those who have studied his character and have noted how great were his attainments, and with what skill his genius seized upon such stores of learning as he had, must needs regret that so great a mind could not have been more thoroughly trained and better equipped for the great duties which Henry Clay in his lifetime undertook. His appeared to be a mental disposition of intuitions and instincts. He felt rather than knew; he divined men's thoughts and purposes, and his great eloquence was always directed to their imaginations, their prejudices, and their passions, rather than to their understanding.

As a jury lawyer he was always eminently successful. His eloquence, especially in his early life in Kentucky, was regarded as something phenomenal, and it is said of him that no malefactor who had him for a defender was ever convicted. His presence was commanding, his figure tall, graceful, and distinguished. His gestures were large and sweeping, and his manner of address was broad and free. His voice was

melodious, with a prodigious range, sinking into the lowest basso-profundo or rising in shrill and almost feminine notes. The music of his voice is represented as being something wonderful. Most of his early practice was in the criminal

courts of Kentucky, and the most remarkable of these cases was one in which Clay was engaged to defend a Mrs. Phelps, wife of a respectable farmer, who was accused of the crime of murder, having killed her sister-in-law, Miss Phelps, with a musket, which in a moment of passion she seized and fired, aiming at her victim's head. It was impossible to deny that Mrs. Phelps had