was content to
remain idle only a few months when he entered with great zeal upon a new
enterprise.

The project of purchasing Mount Vernon and beautifying it as a memento
of esteem to the 'Nation's father' attracted his attention, and his
efforts in behalf of the association to raise money for the above-named
object netted over $100,000, besides his valuable time, and paying his
own expenses. He afterwards raised many more thousands of dollars for
the benefit of numerous charitable societies and objects. Emerging from
private life at the opening of the civil war he gave himself incessantly
to the defense of the Union. He died on the 14th of January, 1865, and
was mourned throughout the whole North. Eulogies innumerable were called
forth by the death of this intellectual phenomenon of the nineteenth
century.

EDWIN M. STANTON.

Edwin M. Stanton, whom President Lincoln selected for his Secretary of
War, notwithstanding the fact that he had served in the cabinet of
Buchanan, was born at Steubenville, Ohio, December 19th, 1814, and died
in Washington, D. C., December 24th, 1869.

When fifteen years old he became a clerk in a book-store in his native
town, and with money thus accumulated, was enabled to attend Kenyon
College, but at the end of two years was obliged to re-enter the
book-store as a clerk.

Thus through poverty he was deterred from graduating, but knowledge is
just as beneficial, whether acquired in school or out. Thurlow Weed
never had the advantages of a college, but stretched prone before the
sap-house fire, he laid the foundation upon which he built that splendid
reputation as an able editor; Elihu Buritt never saw the inside of a
college school-room as a student, but while at the anvil, at work as a
blacksmith, with book laying on a desk near, he framed the basis of that
classical learning which made him, as master of forty different
languages, the esteemed friend of John Bright and others of the most
noted people the world has ever known.

As it was with them, so it was with Stanton. He had but little
advantages, but he would not 'down.' It is said that if Henry Ward
Beecher had gone to sea, as he desired to do, he would not have long
remained, for in him was even then a 'slumbering genius,' But he himself
once said that had it not been for his great love of work he never could
have half succeeded. Ah, that's it; if ability to accomplish hard
'digging' is not genius, it is the best possib