There is a great painting by an Italian master, who died before the picture was finished. It was taken and completed by his pupil, and bears this inscription: "The work that Titian left unfinished, Palma reverently completed and dedicated to God."

The work for freedom was left unfin

ished. Let us reverently complete it and dedicate it to God-this work for his children—and so shall come into these barren lives, "the tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born, with the Golden Rule grown natural.” ELINOR H. STOY.

Oakland, Cal.

IN

PART I.

IN THE enterprising City of Valparaiso, the chief commercial port of the progressive Republic of Chile, there is a beautiful statue to the memory of William Wheelwright, the modest and fearless Yankee pioneer of modern peaceful commerce, industry and enlightenment in South America. The name of this great benefactor of humanity, who, as we shall presently see, wrought a wonderful revolution of peace, is a beloved household word throughout Spanish and Portuguese-speaking America, but, as yet, his own state Massachusetts and his own native country the United States have almost forgotten that he, one of the greatest of Americans, ever existed, and no stately national monument has ever been erected "in the land of the brave and the free," in recognition of his transcendent merits.

William Wheelwright was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, March 16, 1798. He inherited, from a long line of ancestors, those sterling qualities of deep religious intensity, lofty ideals, undeviating purity of character, and inflexible devotion to principle and duty which have made the Puritans of Great Britain and America such a tremendously regenerative, vital force in the history of the world. Far back in 1636, soon after the settle

ment of Newbury, his ancestor the Rev. John Wheelwright sought religious freedom in New England, but found no tolerance in Boston, as he had become an advocate of the heresies of Anne Hutchinson, and was accordingly disfranchised and banished from the colony by the General Court. Subsequently, he was allowed to return, and settled in Salisbury, Massachusetts, where he died in 1679. His descendants were men and women of strong, rugged character, who lived in various parts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and, by their industrious, well-regulated lives, contributed, with unassuming simplicity, towards the upbuilding of the communities in which they dwelt. Some of them were teachers, others shipmasters, and not a few rendered valuable military service in the various wars of New England against the French and Indians of Canada.

When, at length, the Thirteen United Colonies of North America, from Maine to Georgia, revolted from the tyranny of George III. and the British Parliament, and declared their independence in 1776, Abraham Wheelwright, of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the uncle of William, the future industrial regenerator of South America, rendered important services to the patriots. He saw service in the Continental Army under Captain Enoch Putnam, assisted in the fortification of

Dorchester Heights, crossed the Delaware with the Northern Army under Washington, aided in the capture of the Hessians, took part in the battle of Princeton, and February 15, 1777, was discharged from service. His restless energy led him, however, to engage as a privateersman, on his own account, on the high seas, and many were the adventures he encountered, being more than once captured and imprisoned by the British, but finally escaping back to America. After the war, in partnership with his brother Ebenezer, he established a large and profitable business with the West Indies. He died April 19, 1852, at the advanced age of ninety-five.

From the foregoing, it will be seen from what sturdy stock William, destined to be the most illustrious of all his family, sprang. His father, Ebenezer, a shipmaster in his early life, was a man of intense earnestness and his mother Anna (Coombs) Wheelwright possessed the highly practical yet religious nature of her Puritan ancestors.

The environment surrounding young William Wheelwright, from his earliest infancy, was well fitted for preparing him for his future career. He passed his boyhood in the fine house, on the commanding hill of the "Old Indian Ridge," on High street, Newburyport, built, two years after his birth, by his father, in 1800, but now remodeled and occupied by the Hon. John James Currier, the local historian. Here, in those early days, could be seen a wide, unobstructed view of the Parker river, with the wharves and warehouses and vessels of the growing and thriving port on its right bank, the thick woods of Amesbury and Salisbury, on its farther bank, and the Atlantic in the distant east, Parker river being really the mouth of the Merrimack and a narrow arm of the ocean itself. Behind the house southward and westward, stretched a wide sweep of hills and valleys, still, in our own time, retaining much of the charm and loveliness of the primeval

wilderness.

The Newburyport of Wheelwright's boyhood days vied with Boston and Salem as a commercial port, in spite of a sandbar which blocks its free access to the sea. Its substantial merchants carried on an extensive trade with Mexico, South America and the West Indies, and were the owners, captains, and not infrequently, builders of the compact sailing-ships with which they braved the terrors of the deep, not a few of these staunch vessels, of from five hundred to a thousand tons, being wrecked in tempests of the ocean and never being heard of again. Although Newburyport has completely changed its industrial activities and is now chiefly a shoe city and imports quite large amounts of coal from Philadelphia, the warehouses of the old international maritime port are yet standing on the water-front, and one may see high spacious rooms in them, twenty feet square. In the lower part of the city, there are many straight, narrow, yet scrupulously clean streets, with peaked, gable and projecting-roofed houses, both externally and in their interiors carrying the mind back, long before the American Revolution, to the British colonial régime. In the upper part of Newburyport are broad avenues shaded on both sides by noble trees, and where quite a number of large houses, the homes of its longdeceased merchant-princes, may be seen, with their antique furniture, their landscape wall-paper, and their high rooms, with five to six windows apiece. On every hand, there are reminders of the old days of shipmasters and sea captains when the town was an important entrepot of international commerce.

Newburyport, although one of the lesser cities of New England, has always enjoyed a deserved reputation for the exceptional public spirit of its inhabitants. Its cemeteries contain the names of the Danas, Pillsburys and those of other families who have furnished philanthropists, statesmen, heroes, lawyers, journalists and captains of industry who have notably contributed towards making the

United States the splendid and great republic which it has become. Locally, Newburyport is indebted to Captain Bromfield for the beautiful broad avenues of elm and other trees that impart a special charm to her best quarter, as he left a special fund to be perpetually devoted to that beneficent purpose. One of the noblest, however, of all Newburyport's sons is William Wheelwright's contemporary, the elder William Lloyd Garrison, born December 10, 1805, whose unswerving devotion to the principle of equal rights made him face mob violence, persecution and ostracism until he had awakened the deadened conscience of the American people, broken the shackles of millions of human beings, and rendered forever impossible the continuance of the curse of African and negro slavery. He died in 1879.

The influence and example of Garrison, the Liberator, doubtless helped to mould the character of William Wheelwright, no less an emancipator of millions of his fellow-creatures, who successfully implanted modern enlightenment and civilization in the vast Latin-American

continent, from the Rio Grande of Texas and Mexico to Cape Horn, at the extreme southern extremity of South America. Fortunately, this latter revolution was peaceful and was accomplished without the shedding of a single drop of human blood.

Young William early developed such a strong love of the sea that his parents wisely directed his natural bent. With their consent, he shipped as a cabin boy on a vessel bound for the West Indies, and in three years rose rapidly through all the grades, until he became a captain in 1817, at the age of only nineteen years. He had previously passed through the experience of a shipwreck in the Bahamas, the ship taking fire and all on board having a narrow escape with their lives. The leaky boat in which they embarked had to be bailed out with their hats. Wheelwright, on this occasion, very nearly lost his life in saving a drowning, intoxicated sailor. On reaching shore, they traveled a long distance through the tall grass, until they came to a plantation, where they were kindly cared for. A second voyage to the West Indies was hardly