recently published an interesting memoir of him, which reveals to us a
cast of character beautiful and rare in men; a character in which the
moral qualities ruled with an easy and absolute sway, and from which the
baser traits appeared to be eliminated. He was like that great,
splendid, yellow king of dogs which escaped perfection by not having
just a spice of evil in his composition.

Let me add, however, that he was as far as possible from being a
"spoony." Mr. Wright says:--

"He had the strength of a giant, and did not abstain from using it in a
combative sense on a fit occasion. When his eldest daughter was living
in a house not far from his own, with her first child in her arms, he
became aware that she was in danger from a stout, unprincipled tramp who
had called on her as a beggar and found her alone. Hastening to the
house, without saying a word he grasped the fellow around body and both
arms, and carried him, bellowing for mercy, through the yard and into
the middle of the street, where he set him down. Greatly relieved, the
miserable wretch ran as if he had escaped from a lion."

Mr. Wright adds another trait: "Once in Lyons (N. Y.) when there was
great excitement about the 'sin of dancing,' the ministers all preaching
and praying against it, Myron Holley quietly said: 'It is as natural for
young people to like to dance as for the apple trees to blossom in the
spring.'"

THE FOUNDERS OF LOWELL.

We do not often hear of strikes at Lowell. Some men tell us it is
because there are not as many foreigners there as at certain
manufacturing centres where strikes are frequent. This cannot be the
explanation; for out of a population of seventy-one thousand, there are
more than twenty thousand foreign-born inhabitants of Lowell, of whom
more than ten thousand are natives of Ireland. To answer the question
correctly, we must perhaps go back to the founding of the town in 1821,
when there were not more than a dozen houses on the site.

At that time the great water-power of the Merrimac River was scarcely
used, and there was not one cotton manufactory upon its banks. At an
earlier day this river and its tributaries swarmed with beaver and other
fur-yielding creatures, which furnished a considerable part of the first
capital of the Pilgrim Fathers. The Indians trapped the beaver, and
carried the skins to Plymouth and Boston; and this is perhaps the reason
why the Merrimac and most of its branches retain their