falls, rushing down the slants, piling up at the bends and prodded back into the saddle and on through still, level stretches, by the river driver. Colton was the upper station, the first stop where the river began to lighten its load. There, the year round, a big sawmill was trimming and slicing the logs. Guides, millmen, lumberjacks, river drivers, farmers-tired and retired-and Ed Potter's string band, made the commerce of Colton. It was also a market and place of fitting out for hunters and trappers. There one saw the last of stores and houses and churches and "folks” until, coming down out of the big woods, the sight of them gladdened his heart again. In Colton he was sure to tarry. There were rum and molasses and white wheat whiskey and other varieties of "blue ruin" in the bar of the Empire Hotel, where he found a genial host in Charley Sanborn and excellent food and good company and a warm fireside. There, or in the hardware store, or the drug shop, or the corner grocery, surrounded by grateful aromas of "store tea" and "boughten molasses" or "red licker", he would find kindred souls glad to listen to his tales of adventure in the great woods and to tell their own, while the smoke of their clay pipes, and, now and then, a "cow swaller" increased their valor and volubility. They were like the story-tellers of Ispahan. Those with a taste for fiction gathered about them and listened. These heroic men were the popular authors of that community and time. Each one of them carried a kind of storage battery in the shape of a small bottle to stiffen the current of his imagination at points more or less remote from the charging station, which was the Empire Hotel.

Mose Leonard, Lute Crampton, Charley Hutchins, Mart Moody and other renowned and mighty hunters were sure to be sitting by these genial firesides on their way in and out of the woods. Some were silent, dignified, imperturbable men. Mose Leonard was of that type. But the hunter, as a rule, was different. Generally he was a man of leisure and lavish generosity, to himself and others, when he came out of the solitudes. His joy at getting back seemed to open the springs of youth in him. He was as playful as a boy. He laughed and danced and sang songs and told stories and pulled sticks. He loved to display his strength and agility. His stories were a kind of mental gymnas

tics. In them his imagination was trying its muscle and creating astonishment. Such were the salons and the conversationalists of this rude village of the Northern border.

Such also was the environment of the boy, Bart Hepburn; such the atmosphere of sylvan adventure and robust vitality in which he spent his youth. He lived on the main road that led into the deep woods a mile or so above the village. Hunters and trappers passed the door of his father on their way to and from the wilderness. Often they stopped to chat with the pioneer and his sons, or to enjoy the hospitality of their home.

The Hepburns lived on a stretch of stillwater. Bart began young to set his traps on the river banks. They say up there that he became a bank examiner soon after he had learned to walk. He caught muskrats and sold the pelts in Colton. In the late fall and winter, he went to school in the village. He was a born mathematician, but he liked the woods better than the school.

Saturdays, and even Sundays, he was often out in the woods with his gun and dog and traps. He became a good shot and an able trailer, bringing home partridges, deer and gray squirrels and, now and then, capturing a mink, or an otter. He made a plan. He would be a great hunter and trapper. He saved his earnings. The autumn of his sixteenth year found him ready to begin his chosen work. His father and mother had given their consent to it. He had bought twenty-four traps and was going into the great woods for the winter. In the spring he, too, would have some stories to tell. He had come home from the village with his traps. His sister, Cordelia, found them hanging in the woodshed.

"Bart, what does this mean?" she asked.

"I'm going into the woods this winter to hunt and trap," he answered.

She was an energetic little body with ideals above those of the rude countryside at the gate of the wilderness. She proceeded to give him, not advice, but information.

"Bart, you will do nothing of the kind," she said.

"What then?" he asked.

“We'll see,” she answered, and without another word went

into the house and put on her hat and shawl and started for Colton. That little walk to Colton made history.

When she returned, she had got a job for him in the hardware store. That place with its guns and ammunition and fishing tackle made a strong appeal to Bart. It started him toward the sown lands. He never turned back, save for a few days of fun. It was the prompt, energetic action of this beloved sister of his which turned Barton Hepburn from the career of a guide, hunter and trapper. He began to read the biographies of great men. He decided "to try an education on himself and see how it would fit", as he was wont to say. He had money enough to spend a year in Potsdam-the next village down the river and a much larger one for two terms in the Academy under Professor Sweet.

Those days, the farmer's son-seeking an education in townhired a small room, at perhaps fifty cents a week, and did his own cooking and sweeping and mending and bed making and, often, his own washing. The stove and wood to burn in it and furniture were brought into town from the farm and the living expenses would scarcely have exceeded ten dollars a month. Bart made a wise improvement of his time. The Academy was full of young fellows equally concerned with the problem of self-improvement. He caught the spirit of the place. He was a good student. The Professor praised and encouraged him. He began to read the tales and poems of Sir Walter Scott and committed to memory The Lady of the Lake. It is probable that the high emotions they kindled broke the vault of his past and called his imagination out of the great woods.

It was about this time that he began to think of his name as he lay in bed one night. Somehow, Barton Hepburn had not the right sound to it. After all it was his name. Therefore he could see no reason why it should not suit him. Most great men had three names. Why should he not have a full equipment of them? They didn't cost anything, so he helped himself to another name. It was Alonzo. Thereafter for a time his signature was Alonzo Barton Hepburn, and later A. Barton Hepburn. His thought had turned from the wilderness. He decided that he would be a lawyer. Mr. Anstead, a Colton attorney,

loaned him a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries. The next winter, he taught the Dorrity School, if I remember rightly, spending a part of his leisure in the study of the Commentaries. In the autumn, he went to Middlebury College, probably because his father, Zina Hepburn, had come from that neighborhood, and Bart put in two years there, teaching winters to pay for board, clothes and tuition. Then he became instructor in mathematics in the St. Lawrence Academy under Dr. Plumb, and later principal of the school at Ogdensburg. Meanwhile, he had been studying the law books. After a term as School Commissioner for the county, he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of the law at Colton.

On a summer day, when I was a lad about twelve years of age, in the old Howard school house, of which my sister was then the teacher, I got my first look at "Bart Hibburn" as he was familiarly called up there in the hills. My sister had been a schoolmate of his in the Academy at Potsdam, and I had heard much about him. It was a moment of dread anxiety, when with a forbidden look through the window near which I sat, I saw this stranger turn into the school yard, sitting erect in a single buggy, and get out and hitch his horse to the fence. I knew it was the Commissioner. Other eyes had seen him. There was a little rustle of alarm among the "pupils"-as we were known in those rural, knife-hacked shrines of Minerva, smelling of apple pie and stale cheese and bread and butter. I remember how proud I was to learn for the first time that I had become "a pupil".

What a silence fell upon us as the knowledge spread that the Commissioner had arrived! The teacher looked pale and serious and began to feel her back hair.

"Carlton, stop looking out of the window. Salona, please do not lean on your desk," she warned in a low voice and added: "The first class in grammar will now recite."

I was a member of that class-there were only three of us who had got along so far as analysis and parsing. How scared we were as we took our places on the floor! I remember the look of consternation in the eyes of my sister as she beheld my bare feet which showed unwelcome signs of their love of mud puddles.

The Commissioner entered and shook hands with her and sat

down behind the desk. He had a full, brown beard of a hue not quite "sandy" but nearing it, I would say, looking back through all these years; deep set blue eyes, a serious, indeed almost a sad face, and a quiet dignified manner. He listened attentively as we recited our lesson, doing ourselves poor justice, I am bound to say. He asked two or three questions, congratulated the teacher and went away.

When I saw him again I must have been about sixteen and he twenty-nine. He stood in the office of the Empire Hotel, just back from Albany, surrounded by admiring friends. He was then a Member of the Assembly. The second stage of his great career had begun. Sitting by the camp fire one evening in the remote and lonely canyon of Fish Creek in western Wyoming, where we were hunting elk, he told me the remarkable story of his nomination and of the singular events that lifted him into prominence.

"My friends had planted the hope in me that I could be nominated for the Assembly," he began. "I went to one of the party leaders in Canton and asked him if he could see any objection to my being a candidate.

"None at all', he answered with an ironical smile that hurt me. "I wanted to know about that, because if I start in the race, I shall keep a-going', I said.

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"Go ahead', said he, but with his tongue in his cheek as if he would have me understand that I would be likely to find it bad going.

"The other leaders talked in the same tone. They had made a wrong guess at my weight. They didn't know me, of course, as well as I knew myself, and those fellows in Canton were running a little monopoly and hitting at everyone who came near it. I don't owe much to them. My travel as School Commissioner had given me a wide acquaintance in the county. I had lodged or broken bread with most of the leading families. All the teachers knew me. I had shaken hands with the best men in every school district. I had made nothing out of my job as Commissioner but friends. Now I began to learn their value and increase their number. There were two or three important men in the county who liked me and believed in me. I consulted