York, he commanded all the artillery of the army, and was one of the very last officers to leave the city. He remained, indeed, so long as to be left in the rear of the British troops, and he escaped being taken prisoner only by going to the river, seizing a boat, and rowing along the shore as far as Harlem. His comrades had given him up for lost. When he came into view he was welcomed with cheers, and General Washington gave him an old-fashioned embrace. He had one excellent quality of an artillery officer, -a voice of stentorian power. When General Washington crossed the Delaware, Colonel Knox, it is said, was of the greatest assistance from the fact that his orders could be heard from one side of the river to the other.

He continued to serve, with zeal and ability, during the whole war. He was known in the army as one of General Washington's special adherents and partisans, and the commander-in-chief, on more than one occasion, interposed his authority in behalf of General Knox. When, for example, it was proposed to place the artillery in command of a French general, Washington gave so high a character, as an artillerist, to General Knox, that the scheme was frustrated. Mr. Adams relates an incident which shows that Knox was equally solicitous for the reputation of his chief.

"The news of my appointment to France," says Mr. Adams, "was whispered about, and General Knox came up to dine with me at Braintree. The design of his visit was, as I soon perceived, to sound me in relation to General Washington. He asked me what my opinion of him was. I answered, with the utmost frankness, that I thought him a perfectly honest man, with an amiable and excellent heart, and the most important character at that time among us; for he was the centre of our Union. He asked the question, he said, because, as I was going to Europe, it was of importance that the general's character should be supported in other countries. I replied, that he might be perfectly at his ease on the subject, for he might depend upon it that, both from principle and affection, public and private, I should do my utmost to support his character at all times and in all places, unless something should happen very greatly to alter my opinion of him."

To sum up the services of General Knox in the Revolution, it is only necessary to say that, at every important engagement and during every important operation, directed by the commander-in-chief in person, General Knox performed, perfectly to his general's satisfaction, the duties devolving upon the chief of artillery. From the siege of Boston, where he not only directed but provided the artillery, to the siege of Yorktown, where, said Washington, "the resources of his genius supplied the defect of means," Knox was always present, active, and skilful.

The war over, he was ordered to the command of West Point, and it was he who directed the disbandment of the troops. He has the credit, as he once had the discredit, of suggesting the Society of the Cincinnati, and the first outline of its organization is still preserved in his own handwriting. Upon the evacuation of New York, he rode by Washington's side when he entered and took possession of the city; and at the celebrated farewell interview between the general and his officers, Knox was the first man whom Washington embraced.

A few years later, when Washington came to the presidency, General Knox was named by him to the secretaryship of war, -a post which he held for four years. The reader is aware that, during the first term of General Washington's administration, the two parties were formed which have ever since, under different names, contended for the ascendency. General Knox was a Federalist, and, as such, shared the odium attached to a party not in harmony with the instincts of the people. Retiring from office in 1795, he removed to Maine, then an outlying province of Massachusetts, where he engaged extensively in business. It appears he was unsuccessful, for in one of Mr. Jefferson's letters of 1799, he says: "General Knox has become bankrupt for four hundred thousand dollars, and has resigned his military commission. He took in General Lincoln for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which breaks him. Colonel Jackson, also, sunk with him." The cause of this misfortune, or, at least, one of the causes, appears to have been an excessive profusion in living and general expenditure. He died in 1806, aged fifty-six years.

Among his friends, both personal and political, General Knox was exceedingly beloved, since he was of an eminently buoyant, happy, and liberal disposition. A respectable soldier and a sterling patriot, he appears to have acquitted himself well in the office of secretary of war, and he retained to the last the warm friendship and approbation of his old commander.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

IN the British West Indies, near that Danish group which, they say, Mr. Seward desires to purchase for the United States, there is a circular island containing about twenty square miles, named Nevis. It now contains a population of eleven thousand, and produces for export every year about a hundred thousand dollars' worth of sugar. This island has a governor, and a legislature of fifteen members; it has five parishes, and a public revenue about as large as the salary of our president. To this island, a Scotchman named Hamilton emigrated about the 1747, and established himself in business as a merchant. He married there a lady of French descent, the daughter of a physician. The fruit of this union was a boy, who lived to be the celebrated Alexander Hamilton, of American history.

year

The mother of this distinguished man had a short and unhappy life. Her first husband was a Dane, a man of wealth, with whom she lived miserably, and from whom she was finally divorced. Soon after her marriage with the father of Alexander Hamilton, he became a bankrupt, and saved scarcely anything from the wreck of his estate. While Alexander was still a young child, she died, but not before she had made an indelible impression upon the character and memory of her son. His mother dead, and his father a poor and dependent man, the boy was taken home by some relations of his mother who lived upon one of the adjacent Danish islands, where he learned the French language, and became an eager reader of books in both French and English. In his twelfth year he was a merchant's clerk or apprentice, - a situation little to his taste, but the duties of which he discharged with perfect fidelity.

At that early day, as at the present time, it was customary

for the West Indians to send their children to school in New York and Philadelphia. One of the earliest letters of Hamilton that we possess, is one written by him when he was twelve years of age to a boy of his acquaintance who had gone away to be educated in New York.

"To confess my weakness, Ned," he wrote, "my ambition is prevalent; so that I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk, or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station. I am confident, Ned, that my youth excludes me from any hopes of immediate preferment, nor do I desire it; but I mean to prepare the way for futurity. I am no philosopher, you see, and may be justly said to build castles in the air; my folly makes me ashamed, and beg you will conceal it; yet, Neddy, we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant. I shall conclude by saying, I wish there

was a war."

This was a curious passage to come from the pen of a merchant's boy in a little island of the sea, at a period so early as 1769. Certainly there was small chance of "preferment" for him in the West Indies, nor did there seem any likelihood of his transfer to a more promising scene. For three years he served in the counting-house, and acquired therein something of that knowledge of figures and that aptitude for finance which he afterwards turned to so good an account.

An accident, as it seems, decided his destiny. When he was fifteen years of age he had the opportunity of witnessing one of those terrific hurricanes which occasionally sweep over the islands of the Caribbean Sea, prostrating in their course the works of man and the trees of the forest. He wrote a description of this storm, which was published in a newspaper, and handed about in the group as a great wonder for so young a writer. His engaging manners, also, had made him many friends, who, it appears, were all of one opinion, that so valuable a mind ought not to remain uncultivated. Accordingly, he was sent to New York for education. On his arrival, he was placed in a school at Elizabethtown, in New Jersey, a place where many families of distinction then resided, whose acquaint