t
good man's life. Mr. Madison wrote two long letters to him on public
topics in his eighty-fourth year. Governor Coles died at Philadelphia in
1868, having lived to see slavery abolished in every State of the Union.

I have been informed that few, if any, of his own slaves succeeded
finally in farming prairie land, but that most of them gradually drifted
to the towns, where they became waiters, barbers, porters, and domestic
servants. My impression is that he over-estimated their capacity. But
this does not diminish the moral sublimity of the experiment.

[1] Sketch of Edward Coles. By E. B. Washburne. Chicago. 1882.

PETER H. BURNETT.

When an aged bank president, who began life as a waiter in a backwoods
tavern, tells the story of his life, we all like to gather close about
him and listen to his tale. Peter H. Burnett, the first Governor of
California, and now the President of the Pacific Bank in San Francisco,
has recently related his history, or the "Recollections of an Old
Pioneer;" and if I were asked by the "intelligent foreigner" we often
read about to explain the United States of to-day, I would hand him that
book, and say:--

"There! That is the stuff of which America is made."

He was born at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1807; his father a carpenter and
farmer, an honest, strong-minded man, who built some of the first
log-houses and frame-houses of what was then the frontier village of
Nashville, now a beautiful and pleasant city. While he was still a child
the family removed to Missouri, then on the outer edge of civilization,
and they spent the first winter in a hovel with a dirt floor, boarded up
at the sides, and with a hole in the middle of the roof for the escape
of the smoke. All the family lived together in the same room. In a year
or two, of course, they had a better house, and a farm under some
cultivation.

Those pioneer settlements were good schools for the development of the
pioneer virtues, courage, fortitude, handiness, directness of speech and
conduct. Fancy a boy ten years old going on horseback to mill through
the woods, and having to wait at the mill one or two days and nights for
his turn, living chiefly on a little parched corn which he carried with
him, and bringing back the flour all right.

"It often happened," says Governor Burnett, "that both bag and boy
tumbled off, and then there was trouble; not so much because the boy was
a little hurt (for he would soon recover), b