Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/119

 Charles Carleton Coffin.

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��"Milton's Paradise Lost," which was read before he was eleven years old.

The household to which he belonged had ever a goodly supply of weekly pa- pers, the New Hainpsliire Statesman, the Herald of Freedom, the New Hampshire Observer, all published at Concord ; the first political, the second devoted to anti-slavery, the third a re- ligious weekly. In the westerly part of the town was a circulating library of some one hundred and fifty volumes, gathered about 1816 — the books were dog-eared, soiled and torn. Among them vvas the " History of the Expedi- tion of Lewis and Clark up the Missouri and down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean," which was read and re-read by the future correspondent, till every scene and incident was impressed upon his memory as distinctly as that of the die upon the coin. Another volume was a historical novel entitled " A Peep at the Pilgrims," which awakened a love for historical literature. Books of the Lidian Wars, Stories of the Revolution, were read and re-read with increasing delight. Even the Federalist, that series of papers elucidating the princi- ples of Republican government, was read before he was fourteen. There was no pleasure to be compared with that of visiting Concord, and looking at the books in the store of Marsh, Capen and Lyon, who kept a bookstore in that, then, town of four thousand inhab- itants — the only one in central New Hampshire.

Without doubt the love for historical literature was quickened by the kind patronage of John Farmer, the genial historian, who was a visitor at the Bos- cawen farm-house, and who had de- lightful stories to tell of the exploits of Robert Rogers and John Stark during die French and Indian wars.

Soldiers of the Revolution were living in 1830. Eliphalet Kilburn, the grand- lather of Charles Carleton Coffin on the

��maternal side, was in the thick of bat- tle at Saratoga and Rhode Island, and there was no greater pleasure to the old blind pensioner than to narrate the stories of the Revolution to his listen- ing grandchild. Near neighbors to the Coffin homestead were Eliakim Walker, Nathaniel Atkinson and David Fland- ers, all of whom were at Bunker Hill — ^^'alker in the redoubt under Prescott; Atkinson and Flanders in Captain Ab- bott's company, under Stark, by the rail fence, confronting the Welch fusilecrs.

The vivid description of that battle which Mr. Coffin has given in the "Boys of '76," is doubtless due in a great measure to the stories of these pensioners, who often sat by the old fire-place in that farm-house and fought their battles over again to the intense delight of their white-haired auditor.

Ill health, inability for prolonged mental application, shut out the future correspondent, to his great grief, from all thoughts of attempting a collegiate course. While incapacitated from men- tal or physical labor he obtained a sur- veyor's compass, and more for pastime than any thought of becoming a sur- veyor, he studied the elements of suPv'eying.

There were fewer civil engineers in the country in 1S45 than now. It was a period when engineers were wanted — when the demand was greater than the supply, and anyone who had a smatter- ing of engineering could find employ- ment. Mr. Coffin accepted a position in the engineering corps of the North- ern Railroad, and was subsequently em- ployed on the Concord and Ports- mouth, and Concord and Claremont Railroad.

In 1846 he was married to Sallie R. Farmer of Boscawen. Not wishing to make civil engineering a profession for life he purchased a farm in his native town ; but health gave way and he was forced to seek other pursuits.

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