the Pilgrims," which awakened a love for historical literature. Books of
the Indian Wars, Stories of the Revolution, were read and re-read with
increasing delight. Even the _Federalist_, that series of papers
elucidating the principles of Republican government, was read before he
was fourteen. There was no pleasure to be compared with that of visiting
Concord, and looking at the books in the store of Marsh, Capen and Lyon,
who kept a bookstore in that, then, town of four thousand
inhabitants--the only one in central New Hampshire.

Without doubt the love for historical literature was quickened by the
kind patronage of John Farmer, the genial historian, who was a visitor
at the Boscawen farm-house, and who had delightful stories to tell of
the exploits of Robert Rogers and John Stark during the French and
Indian wars.

Soldiers of the Revolution were living in 1830. Eliphalet Kilburn, the
grandfather of Charles Carleton Coffin on the maternal side, was in the
thick of battle at Saratoga and Rhode Island, and there was no greater
pleasure to the old blind pensioner than to narrate the stories of the
Revolution to his listening grandchild. Near neighbors to the Coffin
homestead were Eliakim Walker, Nathaniel Atkinson and David Flanders,
all of whom were at Bunker Hill--Walker in the redoubt under Prescott;
Atkinson and Flanders in Captain Abbott's company, under Stark, by the
rail fence, confronting the Welch fusileers.

The vivid description of that battle which Mr. Coffin has given in the
"Boys of '76," is doubtless due in a great measure to the stories of
these pensioners, who often sat by the old fire-place in that farm-house
and fought their battles over again to the intense delight of their
white-haired auditor.