s traces
of this ancestor in an old Canadian record, wherein it appears that he
once officiated as interpreter in the French and Indian tongues. Whereby
critics may remark that learning French and Algonkin runs in our blood,
and that my proclivity for Indians is legitimately inherited. I would
that I knew all the folklore that my great-grandsire heard in the Indian
wigwams in those old days!

I can remember seeing my grandfather once sitting and talking with five
other veterans of the war. But I saw them daily in those times, and once
several hundreds, or it may be thousands, of them in a great procession
in Philadelphia in 1832. And here I may mention that in 1834 I often saw
one named Rice, whose age, as authenticated by his pension papers, was
106, and that in 1835 I shook hands with Thomas Hughes, aged 95, who was
the last survivor of the Boston Tea party. He had come to visit our
school, and how we boys cheered the old gentleman, who was in our eyes
one of the greatest men alive! But all the old folk in my boyhood could
tell tales of the Revolution, which was indeed not very much older then
than the Rebellion is to us now.

I can also recollect seeing Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last of
the signers of the Declaration of Independence, though my memory of the
man is now confused with that of a very perfect portrait which belonged
to his granddaughter, Mrs. Jackson, who was a next-door but one neighbour
in after years in Walnut Street, Philadelphia. He was a very venerable-
looking man.

My father served for a short time in the war of 1812, and I have heard
him relate that when the startling news of peace arrived in Boston, where
he was, he at once took a sleigh and fast horses and drove full speed,
being the first to disseminate the news in the country. That was as good
as Browning's "Ride to Ghent" in its way--_apropos_ of which Mr. Browning
once startled me by telling me, "I suppose you know that it is an
invention of mine, and not founded on any real incident." But my
father's headlong sleigh-ride--he was young and wild in those days--was
real and romantic enough in all conscience. It set bells to ringing,
multitudes to cheering, bonfires a-blazing on hills and in towns, and
also some few to groaning, as happened to a certain old deacon, who had
invested his all in English goods, and said, when he heard the cheers
caused by the news, "Wife, if that's war news, I'm saved; but if it's
peace, I'm