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Revolution, that he felt constrained to take up a labor with him, hoping
to correct his political errors by wholesome church discipline. It must
have been a scene for a painter.

Perhaps no better man or one more effective for good, ever lived in West
Rutland than Dea. Chatterton. In both politics and religion he was
practical and fervid. The church meeting was crowded.

The occasion compelled my grandfather, as Paul was driven, in his
epistle to the Corinthians, and as Demosthenes was forced in his oration
for the crown, to enter somewhat upon his own past record. Though a very
modest and unpretentious man, yet it is said that the author of the
Log-Book, on this memorable occasion straightened himself up, and boldly
referred his hearers to the glorious days of the war for Independence,
which had tried men's souls, and when he had forever sealed the
genuineness of his own patriotism, by hazarding his life both by sea
and land for his country.

Weighed in the balances on his own record, so far from being found
wanting, his patriotism was proved to be of the finest gold; and his
place like that of Paul, not a whit behind that of the chiefest apostle.
Though he did not feel it to be his duty to fall in behind the tap of
the drum, and volunteer to fight, beside the aged democratic veteran who
served with him at the communion table; yet he showed that the older was
not a better soldier; that with diversities of politics, there was the
same loyalty, and that his own patriotism was no less than his
brother's.

The tremendous strain which the struggle for American Independence put
upon the generation who encountered it, was touchingly illustrated in
the lives of these two men, a generation, or two generations after the
struggle had been successfully closed. Amid the quiet hills of Vermont,
the minds of both were affected for a time, with at least partial
derangement. Dea. Boardman labored temporarily under the hallucination,
that he was somehow liable to arrest, and prepared a chamber for his
defence. He was obliged, for a time to be watched, though he was never
confined. A journey to Connecticut, on horseback, with his son Samuel,
when he was perhaps sixty years old, effected an entire cure. Dea.
Chatterton in his extreme old age, after a life of remarkable piety,
became a maniac and was obliged to be confined. He had suffered peculiar
hardships, perhaps on the prison-ships, in the Revolution; and his
incoherent express