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however, when "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag," were performed, the audience broke out in a most violent manner, and cheered the airs to the echo. In fine, the convention did not display enough enthusiasm over anything of a national character to charge a bottle of pop. But all allusions to the south and southern soldiers were loudly applauded, showing clearly enough the composition and spirit of the convention."

With a few further formalities, the convention adjourned sine die, after a painfully short and em

barrassed session.

This convention also had its side-show-an assembly of Irreconcilables who met in a neighboring hall, under the presidency of another Bayard-Hon. Samuel J., of New Jersey. They adopted an address and voted to call a national convention to be held at Louisville on the 3d of September to take advantage of any new phase which the situation might assume at or before that time. There were many members of the regular convention in sympathy with this movement, but the number who actually participated was not great.

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

HENRY WILSON.

His Humble Birth-Apprenticed to a Farmer-Learns the Shoemaker's Trade After Becoming Twenty-one-Pursues an Academical Course After That-Becomes a Stump Orator-Great success-Enters Public Life-In the Legislature-An Ardent Free Soiler-An Editor for Two Years-Chosen United States Senator in 1850-His Career in the Senate-Challenged by Bully Brooks-Service on the Military Committee-Joins the ArmyHis Labors for the Colored Race-Why he Would Not Join the Workingmen's Party-An Answer Worth Reading-A Busy Career.

Our sketch of Henry Wilson, Republican candidate for Vice-President, is mainly a hasty compilation from recent newspaper sketches, of which the New York Times and the Philadelphia Telegraph have published the best which have come to hand. The origin of Wilson, like that of Lincoln, Grant, Johnson and others whom the whole nation has seen fit to elevate to the highest places within its gift, was extremely humble; more so, indeed, than any of the others. His manner of struggling upward against adversity was very like that of Horace Greeley; but as the temperaments and minds of the two men are essentially different, the parallel does not extend to their respective careers after attaining manhood.

Henry Wilson was born at Farmington, N. H.,

February 16th, 1812, and is now, therefore, in his sixty-first year. On account of the extreme poverty of his parents, he was at ten years of age apprenticed to a farmer in the vicinity for eleven years. His master was a kind and generous man, who sent the young hard-working boy to school in the intervals of agricultural labor, and here he soon developed a great taste for reading. He hungered after knowledge, and his evident desire to learn induced a lawyer of Farmington to offer him the free use of his library, which was fortunately a very extensive one. Here the statesman in embryo reveled, and, in after life he has declared to friends that he believes he read during those eleven years a hundred volumes a year. When he became twenty-one he had exhausted the library. We continue the narrative in the words of another:

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LEARNS A TRADE.

'His indentures were now completed, and if he had chosen to become a farmer, opportunities of advancement were not wanting, for everybody liked the shy awkward youth, with his broad, high forehead, his honest eyes and his immense but somewhat desultory stores of information. But he had resolved upon quitting Farmington and seeing the world. Putting his few clothes and his books, his only treasures, into a bundle, he slung it across his shoulder and walked gayly off to Natick, in Massachusetts, where he hired himself to a shoe-maker, with the resolution of working at this trade until he had accumulated a fund sufficient to maintain him in some good academy. It took three years to do this, when he returned to New Hampshire and studied for a time in the academies at Stafford, Wolfsborough and Concord. Most unfortunately, the man to whom he had confided his little heap of savings became insolvent, so Henry Wilson was obliged to return to the shoemaker's bench at Natick.

"Mr. Wilson himself gives, in one of his speeches, the following account of his rugged experience as a boy and young man :

"I left my home at ten years of age and served an apprenticeship of eleven years, receiving a month's schooling each year, and at the end of eleven years

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