such subjects as interested him. There was a split in the Literary Society. Of the retiring body, after immense electioneering, young Butler was elected president, and the question was then debated with extreme earnestness for several weeks, whether the mind would fare better by confining itself to the college routine, or by reading whatever it had appetite for. I know not which party carried the day; but our friend was foremost in maintaining both by speech and example, that knowledge was knowledge, however obtained, and that the mind could get most advantage by partaking of the kind of nutriment it craved. He laid a wager with a noted plodder of the college, that he would continue for a given term his desultory reading, and yet beat him in the regular lessons of the class. The wager was won by an artifice. He did continue his desultory reading, as well as his desultory wanderings about the country, but late at night, when all the college slept, he spent some hours in vigorous cram for the next day's lesson. His memory was such, that he found it easier to commit to memory such lessons as "Wayland's Moral Philosophy," than to prepare them in the usual way. He astonished his plodding friend one day, by repeating thirteen pages of Wayland, without once hesitating.

He came into collision with his reverend instructors on a point of college discipline. The fine of ten cents imposed for absence from prayers, was a serious matter to a young gentleman naturally averse to getting up before daylight, and who earned not more than two or three ten cent pieces daily in the chair shop. But it was not of the fine that he complained. It was a rule of the college, that the fine should carry with it a loss of standing in class. This our student esteemed unjust, and he thought he had good reason to complain since, though, upon the whole, a good scholar, he was always on the point of expulsion from the loss of marks for his morning delinquency. He took an opportunity, at length, to protest against this apparent injustice in a highly audacious and characteristic manner. One of the professors, a distinguished theologian, preached in the college church, a sermon of the severest Calvinistic type, in the course of which he maintained propositions like these: 1. The Elect, and the Elect alone, will be saved. 2. Of the people commonly called Christians, probably not more than one in a hundred will be saved. 3. The heathen have a better chance of salva· tion than the inhabitants of Christian countries who neglect their

opportunities. Upon these hints, the young gentleman spake. He drew up a petition to the faculty, couched in the language of profound respect, asking to be excused from further attendance at prayers and sermons, on the grounds so ably sustained in the discourse of the preceding Sunday. If, he said, the doctrine of that sermon was sound, of which he would not presume to entertain a doubt, he was only preparing for himself a future of more exquisite anguish by attending religious services. He begged to be allowed to remind the faculty, that the church in which the sermon was preached, had usually a congregation of six hundred persons, nine of whom were his revered professors and tutors; and as only one in a hundred of ordinary Christians could be saved, three even of the faculty, good men as all of them were, were inevitably damned. Could he, a mere student, and not one of the most exemplary, expect to be saved before his superiors? Far be from him a thought so presumptuous. Shakspeare himself had intimated that the lieutenant cannot expect salvation before his military superior. Nothing remained, therefore, for him but perdition. In this melancholy posture of affairs, it became him to beware of hightening his future torment by listening to the moving eloquence of the pulpit, or availing himself of any of the privileges of religion. But here he was met by the college laws, which compelled attendance at chapel and church; which imposed a pecuniary fine for non-attendance, and entailed a loss of the honors due to his scholarship. Threatened thus with damnation in the next world, bankruptcy and disgrace in this, he implored the merciful consideration of the faculty, and asked to be excused from all further attendance at prayers and at church.

This unique petition was drawn with the utmost care, and the reasoning fully elaborated. Handsomely copied, and folded into the usual form of important public documents, it was sent to the president. The faculty did not take the joke. Before the whole college in chapel assembled, the culprit standing, he was reprimanded for irreverence. It was rumored at the time, that he narrowly escaped expulsion. He had a friend or two in the faculty who, perhaps, could forgive the audacity of the petition, for the sake of its humor.

It must be owned, that the Calvinistic theology in vogue at Waterville, did not commend itself to the mind of this young man.

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

routine of toil, ten years of possible millennium in every unabbreviated 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