United States or Croatia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The details given by the Duke of Doudeauville as to his early years are very characteristic. He was born in 1765. He was entrusted to the care of a nurse living two leagues from Paris in a little village, the wife of a post-rider. His parents, when they came to see him, found "their eighteen-months-old progeny astride of one of the horses of his foster-father."

He was, however, again placed on board ship, and arrived in New York after a fourteen-days' passage, naturally much reduced in flesh and spirits. From New York he was sent to Philadelphia by post that is, ridden by the post-rider. The horse cost £32, and his freight cost fifty shillings. He was said to be "no beauty though so high priced, save in his legs."

The news of a massacre on the western frontier, perhaps; the arrival of the post-rider with angry despatches from the East; or the torch of revolution thrown far northward from New Orleans. His face had flushed with feverish waiting and he lay with his eyes turned restlessly toward the door. It was Mrs. Falconer who stepped forward to it with hesitation.

You remember that time when you and I and Jersey Dick kept off a party of Navahoes from sunrise till sunset down near the Emigrant trail? It was lucky for us that a post-rider who was passing along heard the firing, and took the news to a fort, and that the officer there brought out fifty troopers just as the sun went down, or we should have been rubbed out that night sure." The Seneca nodded.

We seem to be waiting in the street for the arrival of the post-rider who is seldom more than twelve hours beyond his time with letters, by way of Albany, from the various departments of the army.

"I am already," retorted Rand, "at the place where the river runs through flowers and the pale faces have built villages. Who will say that I did not cross the forest? I was years in crossing it! Here is Lynch's." The coffee house on Main Street was the resort of lawyers, politicians, and strangers in town, and towards dusk, when the stage and post-rider were in, a crowded and noisy place.

The ink was very pale, the handwriting very small; and, having at that time a horror of newspaper original poetry which has rather increased than diminished with the lapse of time my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, without reading it; the chances of rejection, after its perusal, being as ninety-nine to one; ... but summoning resolution to read it, I was equally surprised and gratified to find it above mediocrity, and so gave it a place in my journal.... As I was anxious to find out the writer, my post-rider, one day, divulged the secret, stating that he had dropped the letter in the manner described, and that it was written by a Quaker lad, named Whittier, who was daily at work on the shoemaker's bench, with hammer and lapstone, at East Haverhill.

The record of that life expressed in bold stands thus: 1767 Born May Eleventh. 1776 Post-rider between Boston and Quincy. 1778 -At school in Paris. 1780 At school in Leyden. 1781 Private Secretary to Minister to Russia. 1787 -Graduated at Harvard. 1794 Minister at The Hague. 1797 Married Louise Catherine Johnson, of Maryland. 1797 Minister at Berlin. 1802 Member of Massachusetts State Senate. 1803 United States Senator. 1806 Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard 1809 Minister to Russia. 1811 Nominated and confirmed by Senate as Judge of Supreme Court of the United States; declined. 1814 Commissioner at Ghent to treat for peace with Great Britain. 1815 Minister to Great Britain. 1817 Secretary of State. 1825 Elected President of the United States. 1830 Elected a Member of Congress, and represented the district for seventeen years. 1848 Stricken with paralysis February Twenty-first in the Capitol, and died the second day after.

The next year he was a post-rider, making a daily trip to Boston with letter-bags across his saddlebows. When eleven years of age, his father came home to say that some one had to go to France to serve with Jay and Franklin in making a treaty. "Go," said Abigail, "and God be with you!" But when it was suggested that John Quincy go, too, the parting did not seem so easy.

Show her how unworthy of her is this brother of yours, though in your secret soul you shall know that my guardian saint never had, nor ever shall have, any other face than hers. "Now will I hasten to seal this letter and wake Eppelein that he may give it to the post-rider.