rose-strewn paths of victory. The world has known no truer martyr than
he who fell at Wilson's Creek, August 10th, 1861.

'The history of every man paints his character,' says Goethe; and scanty
and imperfect as are the recorded details of General Lyon's life, enough
is known to prove him to have been high-minded and brave as a soldier,
with a perseverance and a penetration that analyzed at once the
platforms of contending factions, and read in their elements the
principles which are to govern the future of our nation.

He came of the stout Knowlton stock of Connecticut, a family of whom
more than one served England in the old French war, and afterward
distinguished themselves against her in the Revolution. We hear of the
gallant Captain Knowlton at Bunker Hill, throwing up, in default of
cotton, the breastwork of hay, which proved such an efficient protection
to the provincials during the battle. Once more he appears as colonel,
at Harlem Plains, rushing with his Rangers ('Congress' Own') upon the
enemy on the Plains, and, cut off shortly from retreat by
reinforcements, fighting bravely between the foes before and their
reserves behind, and, falling at last, borne away by sorrowing comrades,
and buried at sunset within the embankments. 'A brave man,' wrote
Washington, 'who would have been an honor to any country.' With the
memory of such a hero engrafted upon his earliest childhood, we can not
wonder at the bent of the boy Lyon's inclinations. 'Daring and
resolute, and wonderfully attached to his mother,' it is easy to
imagine what lessons of endurance and decision he learned from her,
whose just inheritance was the stout-hearted patriotism that had
flowered into valorous deeds in her kindred, and was destined to live
again in her son. It was, an ordinary childhood, and a busy, uneventful
youth, passed for the most part in the old red farm-house nestled