son, also named John, figures in the military history of New London. He was a lieutenant in the local forces, and in 1711, when the town was menaced by French privateers, he commanded the troops who kept watch of the coast and harbor.

But the chief glory of the family from a military point of view was Colonel William Richards, of the fourth generation, our Henry's grandfather. As Captain in the Revolutionary forces, he fought with distinction at Bunker Hill, and later, during the British occupation of Long Island, New York, he headed a forlorn hope at night, and made a desperate attack on an entrenched body of the British, in which daring enterprise he was completely successful. He was made Colonel, and after the close of the war, High Sheriff of New London, which post he held for twenty-five years, dying in 1825. His sword remains as an heirloom in the family, and during the Civil War was in the possession of Captain William Richards Hillyer of the Union Army.

In Mr. Richards' manuscript notes of his life prepared for his children, he discourses at some length of his Puritan ancestors, for whom his respect had not been diminished, but if anything increased, by his secession from their faith to one higher and more ancient. He says: "I remember the time when I attached

not the slightest consequence to the matter of lineage and family pedigree. As I have grown older, I have changed in that respect. . . That there were some things in our good old Puritan ancestors that we have no reason to be proud of, I readily admit. I have even seen the time, when I looked at things through Protestant Episcopal spectacles, when I affected to despise the Puritans. The Catholic standpoint, being the very center of all truth, enables me to judge my Puritan ancestors more justly, and to give them credit for great virtues, which they undoubtedly inherited from their Catholic ancestors, or rather perhaps derived from the remains of Catholic principles and Catholic traditions which they had preserved, notwithstanding their apostasy from the old Faith. Their honesty and truthfulness, their directness and manly independence are worthy of imitation by all. What the descendants of the Puritans want in these days is the Old Faith. Grafted again into the original vine of Christ's Church, with all its aids and graces, its authority, its fixedness of faith, its beautiful models of sanctity and wonderful incentives to virtue, I really think they would make a nation of saints."

Of the seven children of the Revolutionary hero, the oldest, William Samuel, was brought up as a boy on his father's farm. His early

education was, no doubt, received at the New London Latin School, of which his grandfather, John, had been one of the earliest trustees. He afterward studied medicine, and, having arrived at the age of twenty-four years, and being qualified to practice, he set his face toward the great West to begin his professional career amid new surroundings. It may be well here to endeavor to gain some idea of these surroundings and of the state of that new yet not altogether crude society of which he and his future family were to form a part.

At that period, when Europe was busy, with allied armies and combined statecraft, in repressing the schemes of the still formidable Napoleon to resuscitate his empire, a vaster and richer empire was peacefully but rapidly growing up on the western continent. The American Colonies, having succeeded in shaking off the yoke of Great Britain, and establishing a Republic of Confederated States, offering freedom and land to all comers, had begun to attract that unexampled tide of immigration which later became one of the wonders of history, and which continues, in undiminished volume but with varying components, in our own day.

While much of this inflowing current remained stagnated in the cities and towns of the eastern seaboard, much also found its way,

either immediately or by degrees, to the forests and plains of the still undeveloped West.

Another feature of this western colonizing movement, more important, perhaps, than even the foreign immigration, was found in the restless energy and ambition of the descendants of the eastern settlers, notably in New England. The same spirit of sturdy independence that brought the Pilgrims and Puritans to the New World urged their sons to penetrate still further into its wilds and fastnesses. They were no passive, stay-at-home race. Moreover, to the rural population, conditions of soil and climate in New England made of life a hard and wearisome struggle. To their ears the stories brought by explorers and returning settlers of level and fertile lands, free from rocks, stones and gravel, of mild winters and fruitful harvests, all to be had almost without money and without price, must have sounded like the Biblical account with which they were so familiar, of a promised land flowing with milk and honey. Hence, for some years before the time of which we write, a great stream of immigration of native American pioneers had been flowing steadily into the western and northwestern territories adjacent to the more thickly settled regions of the original colonies. They pushed back the Indian tribes to new seats, at times ruthlessly exterminating the bands

that opposed their progress; they felled the forests, cleared the land, opened up roads, and founded villages which in many cases grew with amazing rapidity into towns and cities.

As early as the year 1788, the columns of organized emigration had crossed the Ohio River. In that year was made, at Marietta, on the northerly bank of the great waterway where it is joined by the Muskingum, the first permanent settlement in what is now the State of Ohio. Then it was a part of the great Northwestern Territory, constituted by Congress only a year before by the famous ordinance in which slavery was forever excluded from the region. This settlement was carried out by the Ohio Land Company, an association formed in Boston, which had purchased a million and a half of acres on the Ohio and in the Muskingum valley, between the last named stream and the Scioto. To the influence of this great company is generally attributed, in great part, the drafting and enactment of the Congressional ordinance. But the colonization was greatly retarded by frequently recurring strifes with the Indian tribes, provoked most commonly, no doubt, by the rapacity and excesses of the white settlers themselves, until, in 1794, the complete victory of General Wayne, "Mad Anthony," over the confederated tribes at Maumee Rapids broke the spirit of the red