It shares the quality of the open surfboat, through which the latter, though unable to cope with all varieties of sea and thus being limited in its field of service, has been so seldom capsized. Experience has shown what it is, and high testimony could be easily quoted to show that its merits are understood and appreciated.

Captain Dobbins is one who has earned and deserves the reputation and success that have come to him. No man stands higher in the public esteem of Buffalo than he, and no one can truthfully say aught against him, nor has any one such disposition. Full of health, vigor and elasticity of spirit, he is as generous as he is genial, and is always engaged in some good work. Plain and outspoken, he goes to the heart of the matter in hand, and does his duty with fear of no man and favor to none. As an official he is thoroughness itself, and requires every man and

every station to be up to the full demands of the service. He finds many ways of being useful to the public of Buffalo. He is a prominent member of and has been a vestrymen of Trinity Protestant Episcopal church, and is a member of Hiram Lodge, F. and A. M.; is a life member of the Young Men's Association, Buffalo Historical Society, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy; Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences, and formerly a member of the Mechanics' Institute, and Buffalo Board of Trade. He has a son, John R., who served with distinction in the One Hundred and Sixteenth regiment, New York volunteers, during the War of the Rebellion, and who is now growing oranges and lemons in southern California; and an accomplished daughter, Anna, the wife of James P. White, esq., of Buffalo, son of the late Professor James P. White, M.D., of that city.

THEODORE JOHNSON.

THOMAS MCGRAW was born at Castletown, on the river Shannon, county of Limerick, Ireland, on the seventeenth day of September, 1824. He unites in himself a valuable and, considering his place of birth, very unusual combination of blood, his mother, Elizabeth Faught, having been a German by descent and a representative of the Lutheran church, while his father, Redmond McGraw, came from one of the

Scotch-Irish families, whose sturdy Protestantism has stood as a bulwark against the ascendancy gained by the Roman Catholic church elsewhere in Ireland. Redmond McGraw was a man of liberal education and personal culture, a gentleman by birth and occupation, a happy instance of the good results of intermarriage between Irish and Scotch, and both he and his wife were steadfast upholders of the Protest

ant religion, while honesty of purpose and conscientiousness of action marked both alike.

In 1825 the family removed to New York state, and there remained for ten years, the father buying and cultivating a farm, and the son acquiring such practical knowledge and such systematic education as was in those days the lot of farmers' boys during the first decade of life. Mr. McGraw made his landing in America at Quebec, and his first purchase of land was made at a point just south of the Canadian border in New York state. The land was wild, and after clearing it he found it undesirable. He then removed to a point near Ogdensburgh, where he repeated the experience of clearing a farm and finding it less fertile than he expected. From this farm, his attention being called to the land about St. Thomas, in Canada, he bought a farm near that place and sixty miles from Detroit. These frequent changes are accounted for by the fact that he was a man of independent means, and up to the time he came to America he had never done any work with his hands. He had a taste for farming, but no experience. Coming to America for the sake of the future of his children, he had to serve an apprenticeship as a farmer, although already a man of middle age. His ultimate success is the more surprising for this fact.

In 1835 Redmond McGraw sold out his interests in Canada, and joined the tide of emigration to Michigan-then at its height-but shortly to receive a terrible check by the financial crisis of

1837, and the years of depression which followed. He made a settlement in the township of Canton, Wayne county, during the last year of the territorial status, and there his son lived for five years. He did not inherit his father's taste for agriculture, and these five years were profitably spent at school and in the acquisition of knowledge by reading every book which came within his reach. This latter process of education has served the purpose of some very eminent men as the foundation for a broad and liberal culture, but, given the omniverous literary appetite of a boy of a dozen years, with full freedom to read what he chooses, without much oversight from his elders, and the immediate result is likely to be the reverse of conventional. Lincoln gained almost his first glimpse of people and things beyond his own horizon by reading the 'Arabian Nights,' by the light of lightwood torches, and it was perhaps from some such romantic source that Thomas McGraw obtained the ideas of sailor life which determined him to go to sea.

This conclusion was reached soon after he was fifteen years of age, and he almost immediately left home to carry his plan into effect. It is probably very fortunate for him that he was led to change his mind and give up a project so unpromising, and yet his setting out upon an independent enterprise was advantageous, and the result very probably influenced his whole future. He had reached the city of Rochester, New York, before he had quite argued himself out of his nautical fancy, and in that city he engaged as a clerk with a sub