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some small result in verse. He had the ex ample of the great lawyers who have occa sionally dropped into poetry. But with him, as with them, it seems to have been a mere casual and accidental fault — an instance of Homeric nodding. . . In his earlier years he wrote a small volume of verses, but, as his biographer felicitously puts it, "He ex hibited in this matter the same rare good sense that characterized him in all things," he never published it. Certainly, the offence was grave, yet he nobly redeemed himself and afterwards lived it down.1MILITARY CAREER.

When the sound of the shot, which was heard round the world, reached a sparsely settled locality in the Blue Ridge region of northern Virginia, known as the "Hollow," where there were no schools or newspapers, a youth of nineteen, who was to become the colossal Judge, who was to expound and give vital force to the Magna Charta of American liberties, who was to become the great Chief Justice, who, to paraphrase Webster's fam ous figure of speech descriptive of the genius of Hamilton, was to touch the written Constitution that it should spring into life and become a living truth in the eyes of the world, left his home, where balm tea and mush were relished, and where the women used thorns for pins, primitive conditions to which he ever recurred with fondness, and armed with a gun, wearing a pale blue hunt ing shirt, with trousers of the same material, fringed with white, and a round black hat mounted with a buck's tail for a cockade, walked ten miles from his father's home to the muster-field, and, in the absence of the captain, informed the company of minute men assembled, that, instead of a better, he had been appointed a lieutenant, and that he had come to meet them as fellow-soldiers who were likely to be called on to defend their country and their own rights and lib erties invaded by the British; that there had been a battle at Lexington, in Massachusetts, 1 Honorable Neal Brown, of Wassau, Wisconsin.

between the British and the Americans, in which the Americans were victorious; that more fighting was expected, that soldiers were called for, and that it was time to brighten their arms and learn to use them in the field, and that if they would fall into line he would show them the new manual exer cise, for which purpose he had brought his gun. With this remark he brought his gun to his shoulder, went through the manual exercise by word and motion, deliberately pronounced and performed in the presence of the company. This he did before he re quired the men to imitate him, and then pro ceeded to exercise them with the most per fect temper. After a few lessons the com pany was dismissed, and addressed for an hour on the subject of the impending war, after which he challenged an acquaintance to a game of quoits, closed with a foot race and other athletic exercises, and walked another ten miles to his father's house, where he ar rived a little after sunset At the time he joined the company upon the news of Lexington and Concord, to which I have referred, he was a little more than nineteen years of age, and has been described by a kinsman, as being about six feet in height, straight and rather slender, of dark complexion, showing little if any rosy red, the outline of the face nearly a circle, eyes dark to blackness, strong, penetrating. and beaming with intelligence and good nature, an upright forehead, rather low, and terminating in a horizontal line of massive raven-black hair of unusual thickness. Common men may be brave in battle, so in dealing with the life of this most remark able man as a soldier, and in the light of his future greatness in other lines, one does not care so much for personal deeds of valor in battle as for the motive for action, the sense and appreciation of duty, and the manner in which he performed the service to which he attached himself. We are looking for a side light upon the character of a future man of inexorable logic and stupendous intellectual and moral force, and thus it becomes import