transformed into Count Rumford, having
already taken rank as a European celebrity. But he did not forget his
early home and friends, and it is pleasant to find him deriving his
title from the name given to Concord by the early settlers--a name, by
the way, that these patriots misspelled from _Romford_, the village
near London whence some of them came.

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe
again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from
Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New
England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those
interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the
record of a singular experience--that of a bright but untrained New
England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly
European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly;
how she filled her father with consternation by making her best
courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without
inquiring the prices; how--but I see that this _naive_ young woman
is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went
away from home when she left New England.

As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and
distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say
that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this
second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's
genial remark that second marriages are made to illustrate "the triumph
of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other;
they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always
the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame
had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you
wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution
being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers
being likely to arise!

Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search
of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English
parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his
boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he
called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee
islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war,
for the opportunity of distinction i