exceedingly straightforward man, had little sympathy with Church's
weakness, but to-day as one looks at the initials scratched by the
prisoner on the door of his cell, one's heart expands with pity for the
man, and one wonders long and long whether the vessel on which he
sailed was really lost, or whether he escaped on it to foreign shores,
there to expiate as best he could his sin against himself and his
country.

A VICTIM OF TWO REVOLUTIONS

In the life of Colonel James Swan, as in that of Doctor Benjamin Church,
money was the root of all evil. Swan was almost a fool because of his
pig-headedness in financial adversity, and Church was ever a knave,
plausible even when proved guilty. Yet both fell from the same cause,
utter inability to keep money and avoid debt.

Colonel Swan's history reads very like a romance. He was born in
Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1754, and came to America in 1765. He found
employment in Boston, and devoted all his spare time to books. While a
clerk of eighteen, in a counting-house near Faneuil Hall, he published
a work on the African slave trade, entitled, "A Discussion of Great
Britain and Her Colonies from the Slave Trade," a copy of which,
preserved in the Boston Public Library, is well worth reading for its
flavour and wit.

While serving an apprenticeship with Thaxter & Son, he formed an
intimate friendship with several other clerks who, in after years,
became widely known, among them, Benjamin Thompson, afterward made Count
Rumford, and Henry Knox, who later became the bookseller on Cornhill,
and finally a general in the Continental army.

Swan was a member of the Sons of Liberty, and took part in the famous
Boston tea-party. He was engaged in the battle of Bunker Hill as a
volunteer aid of Warren, and was twice wounded. He also witnessed the
evacuation of Boston by the British, March 17, 1776. He later became
secretary of the Massachusetts board of war, and was elected a member of
the legislature. Throughout the whole war he occupied positions of
trust, often requiring great courage and cool judgment, and the fidelity
with which every duty was performed was shown by the honours conferred
upon him after retiring to civil life. By means of a large fortune which
fell to him, he entered mercantile business on a large scale, and became
very wealthy. He owned large tracts of land in different parts of the
country, and bought much of the confiscated property of the Tories,
among oth