the man's fortune was not luck; for by economy, not by hoarding, by foresight, and a generous trust to all laborers who wished to lease lands, his wealth grew to nearly fifteen million dollars.

When he found that he had enough to live comfortably upon, he retired from the bar, and devoted himself to horticulture. He found that the region in which he lived was adapted to the growth of the vine, and began his experiments, which, during his life, extended to the culture of more than forty varieties. He laid before the community, from time to time, a report of his successes, he called on all to come and taste the wines he made, until the tidings went over the earth, and from Germany, France, Italy, came vine-dressers and wine-makers, who covered every hill-side for miles around him with vintages.

Those who came from afar to inquire into this new branch of industry, for which he had opened the way, were surprised to meet the millionnaire, the CatawbaPrince, in his plain garb and with his humble habits.

How many stories I could tell you of this unintentional, odd homeliness of manner and life, from which he never departed, and which those around him found it impossible to depart from, even in respect to the style of the coffin in which he was laid, and the procession which followed him to the beautiful cemetery! His dress was always that of a man of the humblest fortunes; and Dame Gossip says that he was so fond of his old coat, that, when a change became absolutely necessary, his daughters were obliged to prepare the new one, and substitute it for the old whilst he was asleep, so that in the morning he should put it on unconsciously, or, if he discovered the change, must wear the new or none. The same dame has it that a youth, who afterward became his son-inlaw, having caught sight somewhere of one of the old man's daughters, desired to know her, and that, in the park, which was open to all, he met the old gentleman, whom he supposed to be the gar

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dener, and offered him a bribe, if he would bring the lady out among the roses. The old man accepted the bribe, and returned with the lady, whom, with a sly twinkle of the eye, he introduced my daughter" to the blushing youth. And again it is told, that once, on a very warm day, the old man, having to wait for a friend, sat down on a stone just outside of his own gate, took off his hat, and, closing his eyes, dozed a little. When he got up, he found a silver quarter in his hat. Whether it was put there by some one who really thought he was an object of charity, or by a wag, the old man appreciated the joke, and, with a smile, put it into the pocket out of which had to come forty thousand dollars for annual taxes. These stories may or may not be true; but in some sense such stories have a certain truth, whether invented or not. They can live and circulate only in a community where they are characteristic of the person of whom they are told. Generous men are not pursued by stories of parsimony; mean men never hear even untrue stories of their generosity.

And this last remark leads me to speak of the relation in which the wealthiest man of the West stood to the throngs of the poor and the suffering who surrounded him.

If, in the city, you had gone to the President of the Boorioboola-Gha SewingCircle, or to the Tract-Society Rooms, or to the clergy, and inquired whether the city's richest man was charitable, you would have received an ominous shrug in reply. Vainly have they gone to him for any such charities. Vainly did they go to him for some poor, but worthy and Christian woman."

"I will give nothing," he replied; "there are enough who will give to her; what I have to give shall go to the unworthy poor, whom none will help,—the Devil's poor, Sir,- those whom Christians leave to the Devil."

Many a minister has been sorely puzzled by the receipt of a fifty-dollar bill "for the relief of the depraved." His

office was constantly thronged with outcasts, who were generally relieved by small sums. In his relations with these people, his simplicity and eccentricity were noted by all who knew him. Among many stories which I know to be true, I select the following.

Some six or eight years ago the winter was very cold; the river was frozen, and all the "wharf-rats" were thrown out of work. A near relative of the old gentleman came to the city, and passed the night at his house. After tea he sauntered to the office to take a quiet cigar. To his surprise, he found it filled with a crowd more than fifty-of brawny, beastly-looking men. The presence of the childlike old man, his face beaming with shrewdness and kindly humor, seemed alone to keep them from being a mob. His manner to them said, "You poor wretches, I know how reckless you are; yet I am not sure but I should be as bad, had I been exposed to the same bad influences." These houseless vagrants had been coming every night, while the river was frozen, to get a dime for a night's lodging.

The young man had been forced by the unpleasantness of the crowd to go and enjoy his cigar outside. As he sat there, the ugly crowd filed out quietly, each with his dime, (the clerk distributing,) till the last man. He seemed to feel very ill-used, and was scarcely clear of the door-way before he gave vent to his indignation: -"I'll be d—d, if I don't let Old - know that I won't be put off with a five-cent piece and a three-cent piece! Let me ketch him out, and I'll mash his," etc., etc.

Glowing with righteous indignation, and glad of the opportunity, the young relative rushed in and exclaimed,

How was the indignant remonstrant mortified, when the old man simply turned his head to the clerk and said,

"Mark, why did you not give that man his dime?"

"I had given out all the dimes, Sir, and I gave him all I had left."

"See that he gets his extra two cents the next time he comes. I have no doubt I should have been mad, if I had been in his place."

A forlorn-looking man once came and asked for help.

"I am afraid to give you money. I think I know how you will spend it."

Of course the man protested that strong drink was an abomination unto him, -that what his nature most craved was "pure, fresh milk."

The old man, with a look in which it would be hard to say whether shrewdness or credulity predominated, at once hastened to the milk-cellar and returned with a glass of milk; the fellow swallowed the dose with an eager reluctance quite comical to behold, but which excited no movement in the muscles of the old gentleman's face.

On a raw, wet winter's day, a loafer applied for a pair of shoes. He had on an old, shambling pair, out at both toes. The old Wine-Prince was sitting with a pair of slippers on, and had his own shoes warming at the fire.

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Well," said he to the applicant, "you do look rather badly off, for such a cold, wet day; here, see if these shoes will fit you," handing his own.

The fellow tried them on and pronounced them a complete fit, and went on his way rejoicing. The clerk was amused, half an hour after, to see the old gentleman searching for his shoes and wondering what had become of them. He was reminded that he had given them to the beggar. On further inquiry, he found that he had no other pair in the house.

The following significant story was told me by the son of the old man. I present it in nearly his own words.

"Adjoining me in the country lives

his city several acres of land for an observatory which was to be erected; and there is no doubt that he had reason to conclude, as have others, that it was the worst, as it was the most public, charity of his life. That his private charities were numerous and without self-crediting, the present writer happens to know. Once, after going through the great winecellar where millions were coined, I went through the barracks in the upper portion of the same building, where a wretched tenantry of the Devil's poor lived in squalor. Each of these families was required to pay room-rent to the millionnaire. As I passed along, I found one man and woman in wrathful distress. They must pay their rent, or be turned out of their rooms. The rent was two or three dollars. I said,

acted every cent of the rent from each tenant, whatever the consequences, he had many times, as in this case, secretly returned more than it had cost them to pay it. They were left to believe him a hard man, and often attributed his benefits to societies and persons whose charity would have been stifled by the whiskeystench of their rooms.

Thus, then, went on his life, until the day when the Golden Wedding was to be celebrated. That year, the sons, with the vine-dressers, the bottlers, corkers, and all, gathered together and said, —

"Come, now! let us this year make a wine that shall be like the nectar for a true man's soul!"

So, with one accord, they gathered the richest grapes, and selected from them; then they made the wine-press clean and

"You do not know him; he will be sure to, if we do not pay him every cent."

I determined to search him out and represent the case. I could not find him; but before I concluded my search, I found that the poor people had been compelled to sell a table and some chairs to pay the rent. The next day I saw them again, and found them heartily abusing the old man as “a stingy brute," who would "sell the chairs from under them." Yet I observed that they had a new table and three new chairs. When I asked them how they came by them, they said they had been sent by an unknown hand, which they supposed to be mine. A thought struck me, and after some trouble I ferreted out the fact, that, although the rich old man had, for reasons connected with the good order of the barracks, always ex

And now, as I taste it, it seems to me flavored beyond all earthly wine, as if it were the expression of an humble and faithful man, who had a legitimate object, which he obtained by steadfastness. The wine-makers maintain, that wine, though long confined in bottles, sympathizes still with the vines from which it was pressed; and when the season of the flowering of vines comes, it is always agitated anew. Surely the Catawba must ever sparkle afresh, when in it, as now, we pledge the memory of the brave and wise pioneer whose life climbed to its maturity along with the purple clusters which so had garnered the frost and sunshine of a life as well as of the sea

sons.

WITH what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history! The monument that tells of a civilization whose hieroglyphic records we cannot even decipher, the slightest trace of a nation that vanished and left no sign of its life except the rough tools and utensils buried in the old site of its towns or villages, arouses our imagination and excites our curiosity. Men gaze with awe at the inscription on an ancient Egyptian or Assyrian stone; they hold with reverential touch the yellow parchment-roll whose dim, defaced characters record the meagre learning of a buried nationality; and the announcement, that for centuries the tropical forests of Central America have hidden within their tangled growth the ruined homes and temples of a past race, stirs the civilized world with a strange, deep wonder.

To me it seems that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one's hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God.

Standing in the neighborhood of Whitehall, near Lake George, one may look along such a sea-shore, and see it stretching westward and sloping gently southward as far as the eye can reach. It must have had a very gradual slope, and the waters must have been very shallow; for at that time no great mountains had been uplifted, and deep oceans are always the concomitants of lofty heights. We do not, however, judge of this by inference merely; we have an evidence of

the shallowness of the sea in those days in the character of the shells found in the Silurian deposits, which shows that they belonged in shoal waters.

Indeed, the fossil remains of all times tell us almost as much of the physical condition of the world at different epochs as they do of its animal and vegetable population. When Robinson Crusoe first caught sight of the footprint on the sand, he saw in it more than the mere footprint, for it spoke to him of the presence of men on his desert island. We walk on the old geological shores, like Crusoe along his beach, and the footprints we find there tell us, too, more than we actually see in them. The crust of our earth is a great cemetery where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived. We ascertain the prevalence of certain physical conditions at special epochs by the presence of animals and plants whose existence and maintenance required such a state of things, more than by any positive knowledge respecting it. Where we find the remains of quadrupeds corresponding to our ruminating animals, we infer not only land, but grassy meadows also, and an extensive vegetation; where we find none but marine animals, we know the ocean must have covered the earth; the remains of large reptiles, representing, though in gigantic size, the half aquatic, half terrestrial reptiles of our own period, indicate to us the existence of spreading marshes still soaked by the retreating waters; while the traces of such animals as live now in sand and shoal waters, or in mud, speak to us of shelving sandy beaches and of mudflats. The eye of the Trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in Nature without a purpose, and when so compli