gathered into villages, at night. It is a pity that he did not
make a book of his observations.

I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in respect for the
Constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. Slavery
he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined
foe.

He was by descent and birth a New England farmer, a man of great
common-sense, deliberate and practical as that class is, and tenfold
more so. He was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge
once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer
and higher principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as
there. It was no abolition lecturer that converted him. Ethan
Allen and Stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were
rangers in a lower and less important field. They could bravely
face their country's foes, but he had the courage to face his country
herself, when she was in the wrong. A Western writer says, to
account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed
under a "rural exterior"; as if, in that prairie land, a hero
should, by good rights, wear a citizen's dress only.

He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater
as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As
he phrased it, "I know no more of grammar than one of your calves."
But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously
pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a
fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the
public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were
his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a