344 : G0 A -FISHING. 



my father's father, and his letters to his mother, few of 

 which have been published, had formed my study when- 

 ever I could get hold of the dim old manuscripts. I had 

 a boyish veneration for his name and memory, and as I 

 grew older I studied much his bold and ambitious char- 

 acter. It was my pleasure to trace his eventful history 

 from that adventurous voyage down the Connecticut in 

 his canoe, through all its devious ways around the world, 

 up to the moment when a dark veil is suddenly drawn 

 across it and the eye can no longer follow it. 



" It was in Cairo that he died : no one knows where, 

 or how. The biographies of him are brief in their ac- 

 counts, and the private information which is possessed in 

 the family is quite as brief. It is understood only that he 

 was taken sick while waiting to commence his voyage up 

 the Nile, and that he lay in one of the convents, then the 

 only places in which Christian strangers found shelter, 

 and finally died, alone or attended only by unknown 

 priests. 



" None who have studied his ambitious but gentle and 

 affectionate character could fail to be interested in the 

 obscurity which surrounds his last moments, or to imag- 

 ine the visions of his home that must have haunted his 

 dying couch. The sounds of early years, the roar of the 

 Connecticut, the bell of the chapel in college, the surf on 

 the beach of Long Island, the wind among the pine-trees 

 over his mother's house, all these doubtless disturbed (or 

 did they calm ?) his fevered brain. If he spoke any thing 

 in his delirium, it must have been of the great name he 

 was to win for himself in his life of bold travels, of the 

 bitterness of death now when his brightest dreams were 

 to be realized, of hope and ambition disappointed, and 

 with these he mingled, as always before he was accus- 



